GIFT  OF 
Estate   of  Florence  Walr 


MORE  POWER 
TO  YOU 


MORE  POWER 
TO  YOU 


FIFTY    EDITORIALS 
FROM  EVERY  WEEK 

BY 

BRUCE  BARTON 


NEW  YORK 

THE  CENTURY  CO. 

1922 


Copyright,  1917,  by 
THE  CENTURY  Co. 


Copyright,  1915,  1916,  1917,  by 
EVERY  WEEK  CORPORATION 


Published  September,  1917 


Printed  in  U.   S.  A. 


To  come  down  to  the  office  in  the  morn- 
ing and  find  letters  from  friends  whom  one 
has  never  seen,  but  who  prove  by  their 
letters  how  very  real  is  their  friendship  — 

To  have  the  privilege  of  visiting  in  the 
homes  of  hundreds  of  thousands  such 
friends  every  week,  and  saying  frankly 
whatever  happens  to  be  on  one's  mind, 
with  no  fear  of  being  misunderstood  — 

This  is  almost  more  wealth  than  any  one 
man  ought  to  enjoy. 

I  am  very  grateful.  I  wish  I  could 
say  it  more  convincingly  —  so  convincingly 
that  every  one  of  the  readers  of  "  Every 
Week  "  might  feel  that  to  him,  or  to  her, 
personally,  I  have  dedicated  this  little 
book. 


-19801 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PACE 

^  I    "No  ROOM  IN  THE  INN"    ....      3 

II    THE  FABLE  OF  A  CERTAIN  KING  WHO 

SOUGHT  A  NEW  PLEASURE     ...      6 

III  YOUR  BODY  MAY  LIVE  IN  A  CELLAR; 

BUT  IT'S  YOUR  OWN  FAULT  IF  YOUR 
MIND  LIVES  THERE n 

IV  CUT    DOWN    YOUR    NECESSITIES    AND 

You  WILL  BE  ABLE  TO  AFFORD  A 
FEW  LUXURIES 16 

V    Do  You  BORE  YOURSELF?   ....     20 

*  VI    ABOUT  MAKING  MONEY 25 

VII    SHOULD    WE    BE    SENT   TO    JAIL   FOR 

EATING  THE  WRONG  FOOD?   ...     29 

VIII    Do  You  LIVE  IN  A  HOME  OR  ONLY  IN 

A  HOUSE? 33 

-  IX    BEING  A  REAL  PRODUCER     ....    36 

X    PERHAPS  You  DON'T  DREAM  ENOUGH    39 

XI    A  LESSON  FROM  LUICI 44 

XII    I  WOULD  IF  HE  WERE  MY  BOY    .     .     48 


Contents 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

XIII    Music    Is    NOT    MERELY    ENTERTAIN- 
MENT: IT  Is  ALSO  MEDICINE  ...     53 

W 

*  XIV    A  FEW  KIND  WORDS  FOR  BUSINESS     .     57 

XV    SOME  POOR  BLIND  FOLK  HAVE  NEVER 

SEEN  A  MIRACLE 62 

XVI    I  REASSURE  A  MOTHER 66 

XVII  IF  You  WANT  TO  KNOW  WHETHER 
YOUR  BRAIN  Is  FLABBY,  FEEL  OF 
YOUR  LEGS 70 

XVIII    Do    BABIES    LIKE    You?    THAT'S    A 

PRETTY  GOOD  TEST 74 

XIX    Now  WILL  You  STOP  THAT  SUNDAY 

WORK? 78 

sf    XX    ASK  ANY  SUCCESSFUL  MAN     .     .     .    82 

XXI    IF  You  CAN   GIVE  YOUR  SON  ONLY 

ONE  GIFT,  LET  IT  BE  ENTHUSIASM    86 

XXII    HAVE  You  CEASED  TO  STUDY?    IF  so, 

GOOD  NIGHT 90 

XXIII  A  MAN  ASKS,  "WHAT  Is  YOUR  FAV- 

ORITE BOOK?" 94 

XXIV  THIS   HOARY-HEADED   FALSEHOOD   HAS 

LIVED  LONG  ENOUGH 99 

XXV    IN  APPRECIATION  OF  MOTHERS  .     .     .103 
*/   XXVI    THE  LESSON  OF  A  FAILURE  .     .     .     .  108 


Contents 


CHAPTER  PAGE 

XXVII    WHEN  A  BOY  KNOWS  MORE  THAN  His 

FATHER     m 

XXVIII    BUILDING  MATERIALS  FOR  CASTLES  IN 

SPAIN  HAVE  NOT  ADVANCED  AT  ALL  116 

*    XXIX    Too    MANY    MEN    STILL    BELIEVE    IN 

PERPETUAL  MOTION 121 

XXX    YOUR  OWN  LITTLE  BED  Is  YOUR  BEST 

M.  D 126 

^  XXXI  THERE  Is  A  GREAT  DEAL  OF  ENCOUR- 
AGEMENT IN  HISTORY  FOR  MOST  OF 
Us 131 

XXXII    You  SHOULD  NOT  WORRY   .     .     .     .135 

XXXIII  THOUGHTS  ON  LYING  ON  MY  BACK  AND 

READING  A  SEED  CATALOGUE  .     .     .138 

XXXIV  ON    TAKING    MY    OLD    FISHING-POLE 

OUT  OF  WINTER  STORAGE       .     .     .143 

XXXV    IT'S  A  GOOD  OLD  WORLD  IF  You  KNOW 

How  TO  BREATHE 148 

XXXVI    WM.    HOHENZOLLERN,    LOCK    Box    i, 

BERLIN 153 

XXXVII  GENERALLY  SPEAKING,  A  JOB  Is  GOOD 
IN  PROPORTION  TO  THE  AMOUNT  OF 
STUDY  REQUIRED  TO  MASTER  IT  .  .158 

XXXVIII    THE  TIMES  THAT  TRY  MEN'S  SOULS    .  163 

XXXIX      "THEREWITH  TO  BE  CONTENT"         .       .    167 


Contents 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

^  XL    "THE     BUSINESS    ...    Is     UNDRA- 

MATIC" 171 

XLI  SOME  MEN  LOSE  FIVE  MINUTES  EARLY 
IN  LIFE  AND  NEVER  FIND  IT  AFTER- 
WARD   176 

XLII    THE  IMMORTALITY  OF  INFLUENCE    .     .181 

XLIII  SOME  DAY  YOUR  EMPLOYER  WILL 
WANT  TO  KNOW  WHY  You  Do  NOT 
PLAY  MORE 186 

tf  XLIV    A   LETTER   TO   A   YOUNG   MAN   WHO 

WANTS    A    BETTER   JOB    .     .     .     .190 

XLV  IF  You  WERE  TO  WRITE  YOUR  OWN 
EPITAPH,  WHAT  COULD  You  HON- 
ESTLY SAY?  195 

XLVI  IF  You  WANT  TO  KNOW  How  MUCH 
You  OUGHT  TO  GET,  FIND  OUT  How 
MUCH  You  HAVE  TO  GIVE  .  .  .199 

XLVII    DOES  YOUR  RESPECT  FOR  FOLKS  GROW 

GREATER  OR  LESS  AS  You  Go  ALONG  204 

XLVIII    OF  COURSE  THERE  Is  A  SANTA  CLAUS  209 
XLIX    "I  DREAD  THE  END  OF  THE  YEAR"     .  213 

L    "  IF    A    MAN    DIE,    SHALL    HE    LIVE 

AGAIN?" 217 


MORE  POWER 
TO  YOU 


MORE  POWER  TO  YOU 


"  NO   ROOM   IN   THE   INN  " 

DID  you  ever  stop  to  think  of  the  tra- 
gedy of  the  little  hotel  at  Bethlehem 
in  Palestine  —  the  "  inn  "  ? 

The  parents  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth 
knocked  at  its  doors,  and  could  not  come 
in.  It  might  have  sheltered  the  greatest 
event  in  the  history  of  the  world : —  and 
it  lost  the  chance. 

Why?  Why  was  Jesus  of  Nazareth 
born  in  a  stable?  Because  the  people  at 
the  inn  were  vicious  or  hostile?  Not  at 
all.  But  the  inn  was  full — every  room 
was  occupied  by  people  who  had  money 
to  pay  and  so  must  be  served  —  it  was  full 
of  Business. 

There  was  "  no  room  in  the  inn." 
3 


4  More  Power  to  You 

I  know  men  whose  lives  are  like  that 
inn. 

"  Arnold's  heart  is  broken,"  said  one 
man  to  another  recently;  "  his  son  is  a 
failure  and  a  fool." 

"  What  can  you  expect?"  the  other  an- 
swered. u  Arnold  has  not  given  his  boy 
a  minute's  time  for  ten  years." 

Arnold  thinks  he  is  a  good  father:  he 
has  often  told  his  friends  that  he  is  work- 
ing night  and  day  in  Business  for  his  wife 
and  boy. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  his  Business  is 
working  him.  There  is  no  room  in  his 
life  for  anything  else.  And  his  son  is  a 
fool. 

"  You  had  quite  a  taste  for  literature 
when  you  left  college,  didn't  you?"  I 
asked  another  man. 

"  Oh,  yes,"  he  answered  sadly;  "but  I 
had  to  give  all  that  up.  A  man  can't  be 
in  Business  and  find  room  for  anything 
else." 

"  I  hear  Simpson's  wife  has  left  him," 
I  heard  a  third  man  say;  and  his  compan- 
ion replied; 


"No  Room  in  the  Inn"          5 

"  She  got  tired  spending  her  evenings 
alone,  probably.  You  know,  Simpson  al- 
ways says  Business  comes  first." 

In  a  little  village  church-yard  in  Eng- 
land there  is  this  inscription: 

Here  lies  Peter  Bacon,  born  a  man  ana 
died  a  grocer. 

Take  care  that  it  be  not  written  over 
you,  "  Born  a  man  and  died  a  Business 
man."  Make  good;  but  do  not  sacrifice, 
in  making  good,  the  gifts  of  life  that  are 
best 

Take  care  to  have  time  for  something 
besides  Business  —  for  your  family,  for 
good  books,  for  an  occasional  hour  when 
you  merely  walk  under  the  stars  and  think. 

For  in  Bethlehem,  two  thousand  years 
ago,  there  stood  a  little  inn.  And  behold, 
it  was  so  full  of  Business  that  the  great- 
est event  in  the  world  knocked  at  its  doors 
and  could  not  come  in. 


II 


THE  FABLE  OF  A  CERTAIN  KING  WHO 
SOUGHT   A    NEW    PLEASURE 

NOW,  in  a  great  country  there  lived  a 
certain  King  who  ruled  over  vast 
possessions. 

He  had  one  daughter,  a  beautiful 
princess. 

And  behold,  though  the  King  possessed 
everything  that  money  could  buy, — 
houses  and  lands  and  cattle  and  servants 
and  automobiles, —  he  was  weary  of  life. 
For  he  said,  There  is  no  pleasure  in  it. 

And  he  wrote  a  proclamation,  and 
caused  it  to  be  published  in  his  dominions, 
that  whoever  would  invent  a  new  pleasure 
for  his  amusement  should  receive  the  hand 
of  his  daughter  in  marriage. 

Thereupon  appeared  a  young  man  who 
bowed  low  and  said:  "  O  King,  live  for- 
6 


The  Fable  of  a  King  j 

ever.  I  have  invented  a  new  pleasure; 
but  to  enjoy  it  you  must  do  precisely  as  I 
say." 

Whereupon  the  King's  heart  was  very 
glad.  He  smiled  upon  the  young  man 
and  promised. 

The  next  morning  the  young  man  was 
early  at  the  palace,  and  had  the  King  out 
of  bed  before  daybreak,  and  the  princess 
and  all  the  little  princes. 

Together  they  journeyed  a  long  way  by 
foot  and  street-car  into  the  country. 
They  saw  a  wonderful  sight  in  the  sky, 
and  the  young  man  explained  to  the  King 
that  it  was  called  a  sunrise.  They  passed 
brooks,  and  the  princes  took  off  their 
shoes  and  stockings  and  waded  in  them. 
They  wandered  through  cool  woods  and 
picked  flowers. 

Finally,  at  about  the  middle  of  the  day, 
the  King  said:  "  I  have  a  strange  feeling 
under  my  belt  which  I  have  never  felt  be- 
fore.7' 

And  the  young  man  answered  and  said: 

*  That,  your  Majesty,   is  called  hunger. 

You  have  never  had  it  because  you  never 


8  More  Power  to  You 

got  enough  fresh  air  into  your  system  be- 
fore to  create  it." 

And  the  little  princes,  too,  began  to 
cry  out  that  they  also  had  queer  feelings 
under  their  belts. 

Whereupon  the  young  man  produced  a 
large  basket  covered  with  a  white  cloth, 
and  opened  it.  And  behold,  there  were 
sandwiches,  and  fruits,  and  olives,  and 
cold  chicken,  and  coffee  in  a  tin  bucket, 
and  cake,  and  divers  other  foods,  all 
daintily  packed. 

And  the  King  could  not  restrain  his 
hand,  but  dove  in  and  ate  for  half  an  hour 
or  more ;  and  then  lay  under  the  trees  and 
looked  up  at  the  sky  and  smoked. 

And  the  princes  raced  about  the  woods 
and  played  Indian,  and  no  one  watched 
over  them  or  bade  them  nay;  for  there 
was  nothing  they  could  possibly  harm. 

And  toward  nightfall  they  journeyed 
back  to  the  palace;  and  the  little  princes, 
who  had  always  to  be  pampered  and  read 
to  at  night  to  get  them  to  sleep,  fell  asleep 
on  their  beds  with  their  clothes  on. 

And  the  King,  having  had  a  bath  and  a 


The  Fable  of  a  King  9 

rub-down,  settled  back  on  the  royal  piazza 
with  a  fifty-cent  cigar  in  his  mouth,  and 
smiled  for  the  first  time  in  months,  and 
called  for  the  young  man. 

And  the  young  man  appeared  and  said : 

*  Your  Majesty,  it  was  some  day,  was  it 

not?  "    And  the  King  admitted  that  it  was. 

4  Thou    hast    made    good,"    saith    the 

King,    "  and  my  daughter,   the   beautiful 

princess,  is  inside  at  the  piano.     But,  first, 

give  me  the  bill  for  this  wonderful  new 

pleasure;  for  I  will  pay  for  it." 

And  the  young  man  handed  him  a  bill 
for  one  dollar  and  twenty-three  cents. 

Whereupon  the  King  was  exceeding 
wroth,  and  cried  out:  "  Dost  think  I  am 
a  cheap  skate?  Is  a  pleasure  that  costs 
only  one  dollar  and  twenty-three  fit  for  a 
king?" 

And  he  called  the  Captain  of  the  Guard 
and  ordered  that  the  young  man  should 
be  shot  at  sunrise. 

Moral:  You  and  I  had  some  bully 
times,  when  we  were  kids,  on  those  old 
picnics  with  sandwiches  that  the  ants 


io  More  Power  to  You 

crawled  over  and  coffee  full  of  pine 
needles.  But  we  would  n't  dare  take  our 
kids  on  a  picnic  —  perish  the  thought! 
The  neighbors  would  think  we  were  cheap 
skates. 

Pack  up  the  dinner-coat,  mother. 
We  're  off  to  Atlantic  City  with  the  year's 
savings. 


Ill 

YOUR  BODY  MAY  LIVE  IN  A  CELLAR;  BUT 

IT  'S   YOUR   OWN   FAULT   IF   YOUR 

MIND  LIVES   THERE 

THE  other  night  my  friend  Ferrero 
and  I  spent  a  few  years  with  JulitJs 
Caesar  in  ancient  Rome. 

We  went  with  him  on  his  campaigns  in 
Gaul.  Those  were  wonderful  battles  — 
wonderful  fighters. 

From  a  hill-top  we  could  watch  the 
whole  battle  —  thousands  of  men  driving 
at  each  other  with  their  swords,  hurling 
their  javelins  at  short  range.  No  smoke, 
no  trenches;  just  primitive,  hand-to-hand 
conflict. 

We  came  back  to  Rome.  The  city  was 
in  a  turmoil.  Our  great  chariots  thun- 
dered through  the  streets  in  triumph;  our 
captives,  our  spoils,  our  banners  made 
a  magnificent  procession.  The  crowds 
cheered  wildly. 

ii 


12  More  Power  to  You 

Another  evening  my  friend  Green  and 
I  had  a  great  time  together  in  ancient 
Britain. 

We  went  down  to  Runnymede  with  a 
group  of  English  nobles.  They  were 
powerful  men,  each  a  petty  king  in  his 
own  section;  but  every  one  of  them  took 
his  life  in  his  hand  on  that  expedition. 

And  there  we  gathered  around  King 
John,  and  forced  him,  against  his  will,  to 
put  his  name  to  the  Magna  Charta,  the 
Great  Charter  which  is  the  foundation  of 
English  liberties  —  and  our  own. 

I  had  a  fine  time  with  Napoleon  a  few 
nights  before. 

I  met  him  when  he  landed  in  France, 
after  the  escape  from  Elba. 

Up  through  the  southern  provinces  he 
came,  gathering  a  few  troops  there,  win- 
ning over  by  the  force  of  his  eloquence 
the  regiments  sent  to  capture  him. 

We  arrived  in  Paris.  Hurriedly,  but 
with  supreme  confidence  that  the  Little 
Corporal  could  never  fail,  we  got  together 
a  makeshift  army  and  set  out  to  strike  the 
winning  blow  at  Waterloo. 


Your  Mind  13 

That  battle  —  I  shall  never  forget  it. 

Another  day  I  went  over  to  old  Con- 
cord, and  spent  the  whole  afternoon  with 
Emerson. 

We  talked  about  Representative  Men. 

Well,  well,  you  say,  what  foolishness  is 
this?  What  do  you  mean  by  saying  you 
lived  with  Caesar  and  Napoleon  and  Em- 
erson —  all  centuries  apart,  all  long  since 
dead? 

If  you  do  not  know  what  I  mean,  then  I 
pity  you. 

Have  you  never  come  home  tired  from 
your  office,  and  with  a  book  transported 
your  foolish  little  mind  clear  out  of  the 
present  day? 

Have  you  never  learned  the  joy  of  sur- 
rendering yourself  to  the  companionship 
of  the  great  men  of  the  past? 

Have  you  never  sat  in  the  little  London 
Club  and  heard  Sam  Johnson  thunder  his 
philosophy  of  life? 

Have  you  never  sailed  up  and  down 
the  American  coast  with  Captain  John 
Smith,  dodging  the  Indians  and  opening  up 
a  new  continent? 


14  More  Power  to  You 

Are  you  one  of  the  wretched,  poverty- 
stricken  souls  who  have  never  learned  to 
escape  from  yourself  through  the  blessed 
magic  of  good  books? 

Have  you  contented  yourself  all  your 
life  with  the  companionship  of  good 
pinochle-players,  when  you  might  have 
been  a  familiar  friend  of  Socrates  and 
Milton  and  Napoleon  and  Cromwell  and 
Washington  and  Columbus  and  Shake- 
speare and  Lincoln  and  Rousseau? 

If  so,  cut  out  this  paragraph  from  a 
great  man  and  paste  it  in  your  hat : 

/  would  rather  be  a  beggar  y  and  dwell 
in  a  garret,  than  a  king  who  did  not  love 
books. 

There  are  some  marvelous  experiences 
coming  to  you. 

You  can  in  the  evenings  to  come  jar 
yourself  out  of  the  petty  rut  where  circum- 
stance has  placed  you,  and  become  a  fa- 
miliar of  the  immortals. 

You  may  learn  to  face  the  world  with  a 
new  confidence,  a  new  poise,  a  new  self- 
respect,  because  you  have  made  yourself  a 
citizen  of  the  ages. 


Your  Mind  15 

Do  some  real  reading. 

Do  it  for  the  joy  it  will  give  you:  do  it 
for  the  good  it  will  do  you. 

"  Show  me  a  family  of  readers/'  said 
Napoleon,  "  and  I  will  show  you  the 
people  who  rule  the  world." 


IV 

CUT   DOWN   YOUR    NECESSITIES,    AND   YOU 

WILL   BE   ABLE   TO   AFFORD   A 

FEW   LUXURIES 

MOST  of  us  do  not  have  incomes 
large  enough  to  provide  both  the 
things  we  need  and  the  things  we  want. 

We  are  forced  to  choose  between  our 
necessities  and  our  luxuries. 

And,  very  foolishly,  we  choose  to  offer 
up  the  luxuries. 

Thus  our  existence  becomes  dull  and 
monotonous. 

We  can  hardly  be  said  really  to  live: 
our  lives  are  lived  for  us  —  cut  out  and 
sewed  together  by  the  habits  and  customs 
of  the  class  to  which  we  belong. 

I  have  established  a  very  good  rule, 
which  I  pass  on  to  you:  Never  do  any- 
thing just  because  other  people  do  it. 

Most  of  your  friends  live  in  city  apart- 
16 


Cut  Down  Your  Necessities       17 

ments.  They  pay  so  much  for  the  use  of 
their  rooms,  and  twice  as  much  for  the 
location  and  the  fine  marble  hallway. 

To  live  in  an  apartment  like  theirs  is 
one  of  your  "  necessities." 

If  you  cut  out  that  necessity,  and  lived 
in  the  country  or  in  an  apartment  where 
you  had  to  stretch  your  legs  up  three  flights 
of  stairs,  you  would  have  some  money  to 
spend  on  luxuries. 

So  with  many  other  things. 

Every  year,  by  cutting  out  a  few  foolish 
necessities,  I  buy  myself  one  big,  wise 
luxury. 

Four  years  ago  I  bought  an  automobile. 

Not  much  of  an  automobile.  Many  of 
my  friends  said  they  would  rather  not  have 
any  automobile  than  to  have  one  like  mine. 
But  it  was  an  automobile. 

It  has  done  some  wonderful  things  for 
me. 

For  one  thing,  it  has  given  me  my  little 
summer  place  up  in  the  country. 

A  modest  old  white  Colonial  house,  with 
a  brook  running  behind  it,  and  fruit  trees 
all  around  —  a  place  I  had  wanted  for 


i8  More  Power  to  You 

years,  but  could  not  have  —  because  it  was 
two  miles  from  the  railroad. 

But  two  miles  is  nothing,  even  to  an 
automobile  like  mine. 

So  I  can  work  in  the  city  and  play  all 
summer  in  the  country  —  thanks  to  my 
automobile. 

It  has  done  some  other  good  things  for 
me.  It  has  improved  the  country  roads 
between  my  little  white  house  and  town. 
Before  the  automobiles  began  to  go  by,  the 
roads  were  very  rough.  But  now  all  across 
the  country-side  mud  puddles  and  deep 
ruts  have  vanished  as  if  by  magic.  The 
automobile  has  made  the  town  "  dress  up." 

And  it  has  made  me  "  dress  up  "  my 
place,  also. 

Have  you  ever  noticed  how  many  more 
flowers  are  planted  around  farm-houses 
than  formerly  were?  Do  you  want  to 
know  why  that  is  ?  I  will  tell  you. 

It  used  to  make  me  mad  because  people 
who  whirled  by  my  place  in  limousines 
never  stopped  to  look  around.  "  I  '11 
make  them  turn  their  proud  heads/'  I  said. 
So  I  planted  flowers  and  painted  my  house. 


Cut  Down  Your  Necessities       19 

Now,  on  Sunday  afternoons,  I  lie  in  the 
hammock  on  my  porch  and  listen  to 
people  in  the  cars  saying  to  each  other: 
"What  a  pretty  little  place  that  is!  I 
wonder  who  lives  there?  " 

That 's  why  there  are  more  flowers  than 
there  used  to  be  — •  the  automobile  has 
done  that. 

With  a  tin  pail  full  of  coffee  and  a 
basket  of  sandwiches,  I  have  had  more  fun 
exploring  the  wood  roads  around  my  place 
than  Columbus  ever  had  in  discovering 
America. 

My  automobile  has  brought  my  office 
and  my  little  white  house  side  by  side.  It 
has  given  me  a  new  pride  in  my  place.  It 
has  improved  the  roads  around  me. 

Yes,  and  it  has  made  me  a  good  neigh- 
bor to  people  whom  I  have  wanted  to  call 
on  for  years,  and  never  brought  myself  to 
it,  because  I  hate  long,  hot  rides  on  the 
street  cars.  It  has  made  me  a  better  citi- 
zen all  around. 

Gasoline  is  very  high  this  year. 

I  shall  have  to  cut  out  some  other  fool- 
ish necessity. 


V 

DO   YOU   BORE   YOURSELF? 

RIDING  on  a  train  the  other  day, 
I  got  to  watching  a  man  whose  con- 
dition was  really  pathetic. 

He  had  forgotten  to  bring  a  book  or  a 
magazine ;  there  was  no  one  in  the  car  with 
whom  he  could  talk.  For  one  of  the  few 
times  in  his  life,  he  was  utterly  alone  in 
the  world:  and  he  was  utterly  miserable. 

Cast  on  his  own  resources,  he  discov- 
ered that  there  were  inside  of  him  no 
reservoirs  of  thought  or  interest  where 
his  dusty  soul  might  be  refreshed. 

He  was  thrown  unexpectedly  into  his 
own  company,  and  he  bored  himself 
terribly. 

His  was  not  an  exceptional  case :  on  the 
contrary,  he  was  rather  typical  of  the 
ordinary  modern  man. 

In  olden  days,  when  towns  were  more 
scattered,  distances  greater,  and  life  less 
20 


Do  You  Bore  Yourself?         21 

complex,  men  were  accustomed  to  be 
alone  for  hours  and  even  days,  and  could 
stand  it. 

The  modern  man  must  be  talking,  or  he 
must  be  reading,  or  he  must  be  playing: 
anything  lest  by  accident  he  be  left  alone 
for  a  little  time  and  compelled  to  think. 

*  The  world/'  as  Wordsworth  said,  "  is 
too  much  with  us." 

I  would  not  have  any  man  unsocial. 
He  who  withdraws  himself  from  his  fel- 
low men  lessens  his  service  and  impover- 
ishes his  life,  no  matter  what  work  of  art 
may  come  out  of  his  solitude. 

But  it  would  do  the  world  good  if  every 
man  in  it  would  compel  himself  occasion- 
ally to  be  absolutely  alone. 

Away  from  people,  who  blunt  the  edges 
of  his  personality:  away  from  books  and 
magazines,  which  give  him  his  thinking 
pre-digested :  away  on  a  long  walk,  where 
he  could  face  the  world  with  a  naked  mind 
and  compel  himself  to  think  some  things 
through  by  himself. 

Most  of  the  world's  progress  has  come 
out  of  periods  of  such  loneliness. 


22  More  Power  to  You 

Moses  was  a  social  being,  a  political 
leader,  whose  success  was  in  his  power  to 
handle  an  unruly  crowd. 

But  Moses'  great  contribution  to  the 
world  —  the  Ten  Commandments  — 
came  down  from  the  mountain-top  where 
he  had  climbed  alone. 

It  was  out  of  the  silence  that  Samuel's 
call  came;  and  Mohammed's;  and  Joan  of 
Arc's. 

To  Lincoln,  poor  struggling  lawyer, 
there  once  came  an  offer  from  a  great  rail- 
road to  become  its  general  counsel  at 
$10,000  a  year. 

He  did  not  seek  advice,  though  friends 
offered  it  freely.  One  day  he  appeared  at 
his  office  an  hour  later  than  usual,  and 
announced  that  he  had  made  his  de- 
cision. 

He  had  risen  early  and  walked  out  to 
the  little  grove  on  the  edge  of  Springfield 
where  most  of  his  decisions  were  made, 
and  there  had  wrestled  the  thing  out 
alone. 

John  C.  Calhoun  once  told  a  friend  that 
he  "  had  early  subjected  his  mind  to  such 


Do  You  Bore  Yourself?         23 

a  rigid  course  of  discipline,  and  had  per- 
sisted without  faltering  until  he  had  ac- 
quired a  perfect  control  over  it;  that  he 
could  now  confine  it  to  any  subject  as  long 
as  he  pleased  without  wandering  even  for 
a  moment;  that  it  was  his  habit,  when  he 
set  out  alone  for  a  walk  or  a  ride,  to  select 
a  subject  for  reflection,  and  that  he  never 
suffered  his  attention  to  wander  from  it 
until  he  was  satisfied  with  its  exam- 


ination." 


"  How  do  you  wish  to  be  shaved,  sir?  " 
Daniel  Webster's  barber  once  asked 
him. 

To  which  the  great  man  replied:  "  In 
silence,  sir." 

There  is  no  great  success  without  con- 
centration: and  no  concentration  in  minds 
that  have  not  been  disciplined  to  long- 
continued,  self-reliant  thought. 

Store  your  mind  with  thoughts  worth 
while:  be  independent  of  the  world  of 
chatter  —  yes,  even  occasionally  of  the 
world  of  books.  For  in  this  lies  the  secret 
of  a  virile  personality  —  and  the  key  to 
contentment 


24  More  Power  to  You 

The  mind  is  its  own  place,  and  in  itself 
Can  make  a  heaven  of  hell,  a  hell  of  heaven. 

Wise  men  stock  their  heaven  with 
good  things,  and  carry  it  always  with 
them. 


Tl 

ABOUT  MAKING  MONEY 

IT  is  easy  to  be  hypocritical  on  the  sub 
ject  of  money.     We  have  formed  a 
habit   of  pretending  publicly  to    despise 
money,  while  actually  working  our  heads 
off  to  get  more  of  it. 

We  make  speeches  to  young  men  advis- 
ing them  to  "  seek  the  higher  good,"  and 
hurry  straightway  to  our  offices  to  make 
up  for  lost  time. 

Let  us  have  done  with  such  hypocrisy. 

We  are  all  out  to  make  money;  nor  is 
there  anything  reprehensible  in  that  fact. 

Wise  old  Sam  Johnson  said:  "  There 
are  few  occupations  in  which  men  can  be 
more  harmlessly  employed  than  in  mak- 
ing money." 

It  is  not  "  money  "  that  is  the  "  root  of 
all  evil,"  as  we  often  misquote,  but  "  the 
love  of  money." 

25 


26  More  Power  to  You 

How  much  of  yourself  are  you  willing  to 
sell  for  money? 

The  answer  to  that  question  is  none  of 
my  business.     It  is  a  personal  question  - 
a  question  for  you  to  ask  yourself. 

But  if  you  are  the  sort  of  person  I  think 
you  are,  your  answer  to  it  will  be  some- 
thing like  this : 

There  are  some  things  I  am  not  willing 
to  sell  for  money. 

/  will  not  sell  my  health.  Not  for  all 
the  money  in  the  world  will  I  die  twenty 
years  before  my  time,  as  Harriman  did; 
nor  spend  my  old  age  drinking  hot  water, 
like  John  D.  Rockefeller. 

I  will  not  sell  my  home.  I  will  forget 
my  business  when  I  leave  my  office.  My 
home  shall  be  a  place  of  rest  and  high 
thinking  and  peace  —  not  a  mere  annex 
to  my  factory  or  office,  where  the  talk  is 
of  nothing  but  gains  and  loss. 

/  will  not  sell  my  honor.  I  will  not 
engage  in  any  business,  no  matter  what  the 
profit,  that  does  not  contribute  something 
to  the  happiness  and  progress  of  the 
world. 


About  Making  Money  27 

King  Midas,  in  a  fit  of  covetousness, 
prayed  that  everything  he  touched  might 
turn  to  gold. 

And  his  prayer  was  granted. 

The  food  he  was  lifting  to  his  mouth 
turned  to  gold :  his  wife,  if  he  had  touched 
her,  would  have  turned  to  gold. 

There  are  too  many  King  Midases  loose 
in  the  world. 

They  do  not  have  the  Midas  touch: 
they  have  the  Midas  look. 

They  see  nothing  but  money. 

A  beautiful  garden  to  them  is  merely 
something  that  "  must  have  cost  a  thou- 
sand dollars." 

They  look  on  their  homes  and  they  see, 
not  a  home,  but  an  expense  of  so  much  a 
month. 

They  look  on  their  wives,  and  figure 
how  much  less  it  cost  them  to  live  when 
they  lived  alone. 

The  universe,  to  them,  is  a  balance- 
sheet:  their  minds  are  adding-machines : 
their  hearts  beat  in  tune  with  the  ticker. 

God  pity  them  —  the  men  with  the 
Midas  look! 


28  More  Power  to  You 

Get  money  —  but  stop  once  in  a  while 
to  figure  what  it  is  costing  you  to  get  it. 

No  man  gets  it  without  giving  some- 
thing in  return. 

The  wise  man  gives  his  labor  and 
ability. 

The  fool  gives  his  life. 


VII 

SHOULD  WE   BE   SENT  TO   JAIL   FOR 
EATING   THE    WRONG    FOOD? 

IN  Erewhon  people  were  sent  to  jail  for 
eating  the  wrong  food. 
Ever  hear  of  Erewhon? 
It  is  a  mythical  country  which  a  man 
named  Samuel  Butler  wrote  about. 

This  is  what  I  gathered  [says  Samuel  Butler], 
That  in  that  country,  if  a  man  falls  into  ill  health 
or  catches  any  disorder,  or  fails  bodily  before  he 
is  seventy  years  old,  he  is  tried  before  a  jury  of 
his  countrymen,  and  if  convicted  is  held  up  to 
public  scorn  and  sentenced  to  jail.  .  .  .  But  if 
a  man  forges  a  cheque,  or  sets  a  house  on  fire,  or 
does  any  other  such  things  as  are  criminal  in  our 
country,  he  is  either  taken  to  a  hospital  and  most 
carefully  tended  at  the  public  expense,  or,  if  he 
is  in  good  circumstances,  he  lets  it  be  known  to 
all  his  friends  that  he  is  suffering  from  a  severe 
fit  of  immorality,  just  as  we  do  when  we  are  ill; 
and  they  come  and  visit  him  with  great  solici- 
29 


30  More  Power  to  You 

tude,  and  inquire  with  interest  how  it  all  came 
about,  what  symptoms  first  showed  themselves, 
etc. —  questions  which  he  will  answer  with  per- 
fect unreserve. 

Butler  says  he  visited  a  court  in  Ere- 
whon,  and  saw  prisoners  being  sentenced 
for  eating  improperly  and  otherwise  in- 
juring their  health.  To  one  hardened 
criminal  the  judge  said: 

"  Prisoner  at  the  bar,  you  have  been  accused 
of  the  great  crime  of  laboring  under  pulmonary 
consumption,  and,  after  an  impartial  trial  before 
a  jury  of  your  countrymen,  you  have  been  found 
guilty.  .  .  .  This  is  not  your  first  offense:  you 
have  had  a  long  career  of  crime.  You  were  con- 
victed of  aggravated  bronchitis  last  year;  and  I 
find  that,  although  you  are  now  only  twenty-three 
years  old,  you  have  been  imprisoned  no  less  than 
fourteen  times  for  illnesses  of  a  more  or  less  hate- 
ful character." 

In  Erewhon,  you  see,  the  man  who  lets 
his  health  go  to  pieces  is  counted  a  greater 
criminal  than  the  man  who  burns  down  a 
barn  or  forges  a  check. 

His  health  is  a  part  of  the  State's  as- 


Eating  the  Wrong  Food         31 

sets:  by  ruining  it  he  defrauds  the  State, 
and  makes  himself  liable  to  punishment. 

There  is  something  to  be  said  in  favor 
of  the  Erewhon  custom. 

We  are  too  sympathetic  with  certain 
sorts  of  sick  people.  They  are  sick  be- 
cause of  their  own  bad  habits  —  usually 
because  they  eat  too  much  or  eat  the  wrong 
kind  of  food. 

They  are  very  careful  that  the  oil  they 
buy  for  their  automobiles  shall  be  of  pre- 
cisely the  right  grade,  but  they  never  stop 
to  ask  themselves,  "  Am  I  eating  the  food 
that  is  calculated  to  develop  the  maximum 
efficiency  in  my  particular  body  at  this  par- 
ticular season  of  the  year?  " 

Instead  of  sending  such  people  flowers, 
it  would  be  better  if  we  sent  them  to  jail 
on  a  healthful  diet  of  plain  bread  and 
water  for  a  few  weeks.  They  would  come 
out  cured. 

The  Romans  were  wiser,  as  old  Dr. 
Thomas  Moffett  tells  us: 

The  Romans  once  banished  Physickians  out  of 
Rome  under  pretense  that  physick  drugs  weak- 


32  More  Power  to  You 

ened  the  people's  stomacks;  and  cooks  for  cor- 
rupting and  enforcing  appetites  with  strange 
sawces  and  seasonings.  Yet  they  retained  Cato, 
chief  dietiest  of  that  time,  and  all  of  them  that 
were  able  (without  physick)  to  prevent  and  cure 
diseases. 

If  you  would  banish  physickians  and  do 
without  physick,  be  your  own  Cato. 

Find  out  whether  your  food  is  building 
your  system  up  or  merely  clogging  it  up. 

Give  a  little  attention  to  this  subject 
if  you  would  be  really  well  —  as  much 
attention,  for  instance,  as  you  give  to 
discovering  the  proper  oil  for  your 
automobile. 


VIII 

DO  YOU   LIVE   IN  A   HOME   OR  ONLY   IN 
A    HOUSE? 

PEOPLE  use  words  loosely. 
They  speak  of  "  owning  a  house  " 
and  "  owning  a  home  "  as  if  both  phrases 
meant  the  same. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  many  a  man  who 
pays  rent  all  his  life  owns  his  own  home; 
and  many  a  family  has  successfully  saved 
for  a  home  only  to  find  itself  at  last  with 
nothing  but  a  house. 

I  knew  one  such  case. 

To  "  own  their  own  home  "  became  a 
perfect  obsession  with  the  family  —  a 
false  god  to  which  everything  else  must 
be  sacrificed. 

To  swell  the  sacred  fund,  the  father 
wore  clothes  so  shabby  that  his  business 
progress  was  retarded.  The  children 
were  under-nourished,  and  two  of  them 
died.  Life  lost  every  vestige  of  sweet- 

33 


34  More  Power  to  You 

ness  in  the  driving  struggle  to  scrimp  and 
to  pay. 

At  length  ambition  was  realized:  they 
stepped  through  the  door  of  the  house  on 
which  the  last  cent  had  been  paid.  They 
had  bought  their  house :  but  in  the  process 
they  had  destroyed  their  home. 

What  is  the  ideal  home? 

I  should  say,  first  of  all,  it  is  a  "  cozy  " 
place,  a  place  not  too  large. 

The  Vatican  has  15,000  rooms.  The 
Pope  could,  if  he  would,  sleep  every  night 
for  forty  years  in  a  different  room.  The 
Winter  Palace  at  Petrograd  is  so  vast  that, 
once  when  repairs  were  to  be  made  on  the 
roof,  peasants  were  found  living  there  in 
wooden  shacks,  their  existence  unsuspected 
by  the  glittering  tenants  underneath. 

But  these  palaces  are  not  homes. 

The  turtle  does  not  construct  a  shell  ten 
times  larger  than  it  needs;  the  bird  does 
not  spread  her  nest  across  a  whole  tree-top 
merely  because  materials  happen  to  be 
at  hand.  Only  man  commits  the  foolish 
error  of  building  a  house  too  large  to  be  a 
home. 


A  Home  or  a  House?  35 

The  ideal  home  is  a  place  of  rest. 

One  can  rest  in  a  room  simply  furnished, 
but  not  in  a  department  store  or  a 
museum.  You  would  not  fill  your  home 
with  warring  visitors:  do  not  crowd  it 
with  pictures,  bric-a-brac,  and  "  souve- 
nirs "  that  jar  and  clash. 

And  the  home  is  a  place  of  peace: 

A  place  where  the  soul  is  "  restored"; 
where  a  few  pictures  suggest  the  fragrance 
and  healing  of  the  out-of-doors;  where 
good  books  lift  the  tired  mind  out  of  it- 
self into  the  companionship  of  the  wise 
and  great  of  all  ages;  where  love  and  sym- 
pathy conquer  care. 

The  cave-man  who  first  piled  stones  to- 
gether into  a  rude  hut  did  it  to  provide 
a  shelter  for  his  most  precious  possession, 
the  sacred  fire. 

There  is  a  sacred  fire  that  burns  in  every 
real  home;  an  altar  to  restfulness  and  for- 
bearance and  love.  The  man  who  can 
claim  that  altar,  whether  the  shelter  built 
about  it  be  a  mansion  or  only  a  single 
room,  he  it  is  who  owns  his  own  home. 


IX 

BEING  A   REAL    PRODUCER 

HAVE  you  ever  in  your  whole  life 
raised  anything  out  of  the  ground? 

Have  you  with  your  own  hands  planted 
a  seed,  watered  it,  tended  it  up  through 
inf ancy  to  full  growth,  and  finally  sat  down 
at  your  table  to  eat  of  its  fruit? 

In  these  days  of  the  infinite  division  of 
labor,  when  so  many  of  us  merely  live  off 
each  other,  there  are  millions  of  men  and 
women  who  are  born  and  die  without  ever 
once  tasting  that  transforming  experience. 

However  much  of  books  and  travel  they 
may  have  known,  such  people  die  un- 
educated. 

To  them  a  sunset  is  merely  a  color  in 
the  west:  a  storm  is  an  interference  with 
the  routine  of  their  going  about 

They  have  never  looked  into  the  sunset 
yearningly  for  promise  of  a  warm  day  that 
will  coax  the  buds  upon  their  plants  into 
36 


Being  a  Real  Producer          37 

fuller  life:  they  have  never  stood  and 
watched  the  leaves  fairly  leap  to  be 
watered  by  the  rain. 

They  have  never  once  peeped  back  of 
the  curtain  of  external  things  to  see  the 
miracle  of  God  at  work  on  His  world. 

Every  man  and  woman  who  can  have 
access  to  a  little  piece  of  land  —  no  mat- 
ter how  small  —  ought  to  make  a  garden. 
Not  for  the  sake  of  thrift  alone,  but  for 
the  development  of  his  or  her  own 
character. 

God  was  the  first  gardener:  He  started 
the  human  race  in  a  garden. 

From  that  day  to  this,  whenever  man 
has  grown  weary  of  the  complexities  of 
life,  whenever  his  spirit  has  been  dis- 
traught and  sore,  he  has  turned  back  to 
the  land,  and,  with  its  soil  on  his  fingers 
and  its  odor  in  his  nostrils,  has  found  heal- 
ing and  calm. 

If  you  are  the  kind  of  man  who  thinks 
at  all,  you  must  have  periods  of  depres- 
sion when  it  dawns  on  you  that  your  job  is 
a  very  artificial  thing,  not  at  all  essential 
to  the  world's  existence. 


38  More  Power  to  You 

"  What 's  the  use?"  you  cry  in  such 
periods.  "  I  am  not  needed.  Abolish  my 
store,  or  my  factory,  or  my  railroad,  and 
the  world  would  still  go  on.  It  would 
still  be  fed  and  clothed.  I  'm  not  a  pro- 
ducer of  wealth:  I  merely  help  in  the  dis- 
tribution of  what  somebody  else  creates. 
The  farmer  is  the  only  real  producer." 

When  that  feeling  comes  over  you,  take 
a  spade  and  go  into  your  back  yard  and  dig 
and  plant  something.  Harvest  time  will 
come,  and  you  can  stand  with  your  throat 
bared  and  shout  defiance  to  the  universe. 

"  Behold,"  you  may  cry,  "  I  am  no 
longer  a  burden  on  any  man;  for  I  have 
delved  in  the  earth  and  raised  my  own 
food.  The  world  is  richer  this  year  by 
five  bushels  of  potatoes  and  ten  pecks  of 
peas  than  it  would  have  been  had  I  not 
lived.  I  can  look  every  man  in  the  eye 
without  shame.  I  have  proved  that  I  am 
independent  of  circumstance.  I  can,  if 
need  be,  feed  myself." 


PERHAPS  YOU  DON'T  DREAM  ENOUGH 

A  CERTAIN  man  went  to  work  for 
John  D.  Rockefeller  in  the  early 
days. 

After  he  had  been  there  a  couple  of 
weeks,  Rockefeller  dropped  into  his  office 
one  afternoon  and  said: 

4  Just  as  soon  as  you  get  this  job  organ- 
ized I  want  you  to  look  around  for  some 
one  to  turn  it  over  to.  Then  you  put  your 
feet  on  the  desk  and  dream  out  some  way 
of  making  more  money  for  the  Standard 
Oil  Company." 

It  was  a  rather  startling  order  for  a  new 
man  to  receive  from  his  boss.  Appar- 
ently it  violated  all  the  time-worn  pre- 
cepts of  business  progress. 

Here  was  an  employer  willing  to  pay 
only  small  salaries  to  the  kind  of  men  who 

39 


40  More  Power  to  You 

keep  their  heads  forever  bent  over  the 
desk,  and  reserving  his  big  salaries  for  the 
kind  of  men  who  sit  with  their  feet  piled 
on  the  desk. 

A  curious  contradiction  of  all  the  First 
Reader  stories. 

Yet  there  must  be  something  in  it:  for 
on  the  foundation  of  that  philosophy 
Rockefeller  built  the  biggest  fortune  in 
the  world. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  there  is  a  great 
deal  in  it. 

The  world  would  not  have  advanced 
very  far  had  it  not  been  for  the  contribu- 
tions of  its  dreamers. 

It  would  never  have  gained  its  steam- 
boat, nor  its  Atlantic  cable,  nor  its  wire- 
less telegraph,  nor  its  electric  light. 

It  would  never  have  acquired  any  really 
great  enterprise. 

For  a  little  enterprise  may  be  rustled 
and  worried  into  being:  but  a  really  great 
program  or  movement  or  business  must 
be  dreamed. 

Over  in  West  Orange,  New  Jersey,  I 
stood  one  day  in  Mr.  Edison's  laboratory, 


Do  You  Dream  Enough?        41 

talking  with  him.  And  as  we  talked  I 
looked  out  across  the  huge  expanse  of  con- 
crete factories  stretching  all  around  us. 
Shop  after  shop,  all  full  of  men  and 
machines,  all  turning  out  their  special  part 
of  the  product. 

And  a  certain  sense  of  awe  came  over 
me.  To  think,  I  said  to  myself,  that  all 
this  huge  pile  of  factories  should  have  been 
spun  out  of  one  single  little  human  brain. 
Thousands  of  tons  of  iron  and  concrete 
and  brick  and  mortar,  all  built  on  — 
what?  On  nothing  but  one  man's  ideas, 
and  faith  and  dreams. 

Most  of  the  work  of  carrying  on  the 
world  is  necessarily  hard  and  dull  and 
routine  in  character :  and  for  it  the  world 
needs  us  men  and  women  who  can  steel 
our  souls  against  weariness  and  monotony, 
and  press  forward  with  good  cheer. 

We  are  entitled  to  respect  just  in  pro- 
portion as  we  do  our  work  without 
grumbling,  in  a  spirit  of  real  devotion. 

We  can  not  by  the  mere  wishing  become 
Edisons  or  Watts :  it  would  be  worse  than 
folly  for  us  to  pile  our  feet  upon  the  desk 


42  More  Power  to  You 

and  say,  "  Go  to,  now;  I  will  not  work  any 
longer :  I  will  dream  a  dream." 

But  almost  any  one  of  us  could  vastly 
increase  the  amount  of  imagination  that 
he  uses  in  his  daily  life.  The  faculty  of 
vision,  like  any  other  human  faculty,  grows 
through  exercise. 

It  is  easy  to  become  so  engrossed  with 
the  mere  mechanics  of  business  as  to  lose 
the  habit  of  thought.  Easy  to  say, 
"  Yours  received  and  contents  noted  "  a 
certain  number  of  times  during  the  day, 
and  go  home  with  the  notion  that  one  has 
done  a  good  day's  work.  When  the  really 
valuable  work  of  the  day  could  have  been 
and  should  have  been  done  under  the 
shower-bath  in  the  morning,  or  in  the  fif- 
teen minutes'  walk  across  the  park  to  the 
office. 

One  man  in  a  million  wakes  up,  like 
Lord  Byron,  to  "  find  himself  famous." 

But  the  majority  of  famous  men  are  not 
taken  unawares  by  fame. 

On  the  wall  of  their  minds  hangs  their 
own  vision  of  what  they  ought  to  be  and 
can  be. 


Do  You  Dream  Enough?        43 

They  are  not  surprised  by  success  when 
it  comes;  because  they  have  seen  it  coming, 
and  planned  out  its  coming,  in  their 
dreams. 


XI 

A   LESSON   FROM   LUIGI 

HERE  is  a  recipe  for  living  a  hundred 
years. 

It  is  not  based  upon  any  theory  of  mine. 
If  it  were  it  would  be  worthless.  For  I 
have  not  lived  a  hundred  years. 

But  Luigi  Cornaro  lived  to  be  one  hun- 
dred and  two,  and  "  died  painlessly,  as  one 
who  falls  into  sweet  sleep."  The  formula 
is  his. 

At  thirty-six,  the  doctors  said  to  Luigi : 
"  Make  your  will;  you  have  only  a  few 
months  to  live." 

At  the  end  of  the  few  months  they  came 
back  expecting  to  sign  his  death  certificate. 
To  their  surprise,  they  found  him  well. 

What  had  Luigi  done?  Taken  medi- 
cine ?  No. 

What  he  did  was  the  simplest  thing  in 

44 


A  Lesson  from  Luigi  45 

the    world.     He   merely   stopped   eating. 

Instead  of  three  heavy  meals  a  day,  he 
substituted  three  very  light  ones.  Instead 
of  getting  up  from  the  table  with  a  feel- 
ing of  fullness,  he  got  up  feeling  still 
hungry. 

Instead  of  half  a  dozen  different  dishes, 
he  confined  himself  to  one  at  each  meal. 
And  each  day  he  ate  the  same  dish,  at  the 
same  time,  and  in  the  same  amount. 

Year  after  year  he  continued  to  grow 
stronger.  At  seventy  he  was  thrown  from 
his  horse,  and  again  the  doctors  said: 
"  No  man  of  seventy  can  stand  such  an 
accident;  you  will  die. "  But  so  strong 
was  Luigi  that  he  was  out  of  bed  in  no 
time  at  all. 

In  his  years  of  careful  eating  he  made 
some  important  discoveries. 

He  discovered,  first,  that  the  rule, 
*  Whatever  your  appetite  craves  is  good 
for  you,"  is  a  bad  rule.  Many  foods  of 
which  he  was  very  fond  proved  bad  for 
him :  and  some  others  which  he  had  never 
liked  proved  to  have  just  the  nourish- 
ment that  his  system  required. 


46  More  Power  to  You 

He  discovered  that  u  a  man  can  not  be 
a  perfect  physician  of  any  one  save  of  him- 
self alone. "  In  other  words,  that  no 
physician  could  prescribe  for  him  offhand 
a  diet  as  well  suited  to  his  needs  as  he 
could  prescribe  for  himself,  after  years  of 
careful  study  of  his  own  requirements. 

All  women  have  an  idea  that  men  ought 
to  eat  a  great  deal.  If  a  man  is  feeling 
badly,  a  woman's  remedy  is  always  to 
make  him  sit  down  to  a  large,  appetizing 
meal. 

Luigi's  women-folks  were  no  different 
from  others.  When  he  was  about  eighty 
they  gathered  around  him  and  persuaded 
him  to  increase  his  daily  food  allowance 
from  twelve  to  fourteen  ounces  a  day.  As 
a  result  he  nearly  died. 

Then  he  went  back  to  his  twelve-ounce 
diet,  and  lived  twenty-two  years  longer. 

"  Most  men,"  said  a  philosopher,  "  dig 
their  graves  with  their  teeth." 

Diogenes,  seeing  a  young  man  going  to 
a  banquet,  caught  him  and  took  him  home, 
and  rejoiced  as  if  he  had  saved  him  from 
some  great  danger. 


A  Lesson  from  Luigi  47 

"  If  I  were  to  assign  any  one  thing  as 
especially  conducing  to  long  life  from  a 
study  of  the  habits  of  centenarians/'  says 
Sir  Henry  Thompson,  "  it  would  be  semi- 


starvation." 


"  Semi-starvation  " —  the  word  makes 
you  gasp,  but  have  no  fear.  You  can  cut 
down  your  eating  a  long  way  below  where 
it  is  now  and  still  be  in  no  danger. 

Luigi's  granddaughter  reports  that 
"  during  the  latter  part  of  his  life  the  yolk 
of  one  egg  sufficed  for  a  meal  and  some- 


times two." 


If  you  would  live  long,  eat  very  tem- 
perately of  a  few  pure  foods. 

This  is  one  of  the  wisest  lessons  you  can 
ever  learn. 

It  is  the  lesson  from  Luigi. 


XII 

I  WOULD   IF    HE   WERE   MY  BOY 

A  MOTHER  asked  me  recently  to 
recommend  a  list  of  books  for  her 
boy  to  read. 

I  answered: 

Start  him  with  a  u  Life  of  Lincoln"; 
then  a  "  Life  of  Washington";  then  a 
"Life  of  Cromwell";  and  Franklin's  auto- 
biography. When  he  has  read  these,  I 
will  recommend  some  more. 

Do  not  buy  these  books  for  him.  Take 
him  to  a  book-store  and  let  him  buy  them 
for  himself.  Let  his  library  be  his  own 
library.  The  love  of  books  is  an  intoxi- 
cating habit,  like  the  love  of  liquor.  If 
more  boys  were  taught  to  haunt  book- 
stores, fewer  of  them  would  haunt  saloons. 

Then  I  went  on  to  say: 

And  don't  forget  that  the  best  and  big- 
gest and  wisest  book  lies  all  around  him 
48 


//  He  Were  My  Boy  49 

and  costs  nothing.  Do  not  let  your  boy 
grow  up  without  some  knowledge  of  the 
miracle  of  creation  as  it  is  exhibited  in  the 
growth  of  a  garden  of  flowers. 

These  books  that  I  have  recommended 
are  the  biographies  of  mighty  men.  Na- 
ture is  the  autobiography  of  Almighty 
God. 

No  matter  where  you  live  or  how  busy 
you  are,  help  your  boy  to  make  a  garden. 
Perhaps  you  are  penned  up  in  an  apart- 
ment. Never  mind.  Let  him  plant  some- 
thing, if  it  be  only  a  packet  of  seeds  in  a 
window-box. 

If  you  would  expand  his  soul,  fill  it  full 
of  reverence. 

4  The  love  of  dirt,"  says  Charles  Dud- 
ley Warner,  "  is  among  the  earliest  of 
passions,  as  it  is  the  latest.  Mud  pies 
gratify  one  of  our  first  and  best  instincts. 
So  long  as  we  are  dirty,  we  are  pure. 
Fondness  for  the  ground  comes  back  to  a 
man  after  he  has  run  the  round  of  pleas- 
ures, eaten  dirt,  and  sowed  wild  oats, 
drifted  around  the  world,  and  taken  the 
wind  of  all  its  moods. 


50  More  Power  to  You 

"  The  man  who  has  planted  a  garden 
feels  that  he  has  done  something  for  the 
good  of  the  world. 

"  It  is  not  simply  beets  and  potatoes  and 
string-beans  that  one  raises  in  his  well  kept 
garden.  There  is  life  in  the  ground.  It 
goes  into  the  seeds;  and  it  also,  when 
stirred  up,  goes  into  the  man  who  stirs 


it" 


Tell  your  boy  the  story  of  Antaeus. 

Antaeus  was  a  giant,  and  it  was  one  of 
Hercules'  tasks  to  kill  him.  But  Hercules 
discovered  that  every  time  he  threw 
Antaeus  to  the  ground,  the  giant  came  up 
stronger  than  ever.  He  had  only  to  touch 
the  soil  to  have  his  strength  and  courage 
renewed. 

Men  are  like  that  —  and  boys. 

There  is,  first  of  all,  health  for  the  boy 
who  digs  in  the  ground.  It  is  not  by 
chance  that  so  large  a  percentage  of  our 
successful  men  grew  up  bare-footed  on  the 
farm. 

There  is  discipline  and  respect  for  hon- 
est toil.  No  boy  who  has  weeded  a 
garden  on  his  hands  and  knees,  under  the 


//  He  Were  My  Boy  51 

hot  sun,  is  likely  to  grow  up  to  be  a  spend- 
thrift or  a  snob. 

And  there  is  —  most  of  all  —  rever- 
ence. 

"  I  often  think,  when  working  over  my 
plants,"  said  John  Fiske,  "  of  what  Lin- 
naeus once  said  of  the  unfolding  of  a  blos- 
som :  4  I  saw  God  in  His  glory  passing 
near  me,  and  bowed  my  head  in  worship.'  ' 

By  all  means,  teach  your  boy  the  love 
of  good  books.  But  do  not  let  him  hold 
his  books  so  close  to  his  eyes  that  he  fails 
to  read  the  greatest  mystery  serial  story 
in  the  world  —  the  serial  story  of  which 
God  writes  a  new  and  more  wonderful  in- 
stalment every  spring. 


XIII 

MUSIC   IS   NOT  MERELY   ENTERTAIN- 
MENT:  IT   IS   ALSO   MEDICINE 

I  LIKE  grand  opera  music,  and  dislike 
grand  opera.  In  the  first  place, 
grand  opera  costs  too  much. 

In  the  second  place,  it  seems  to  me  a 
hybrid  art.  Acting  and  singing  no  more 
belong  together  —  for  me  —  than  read- 
ing and  dancing.  The  acting  of  a  play  or 
the  narration  of  a  story  carries  me  along 
with  it.  I  can  surrender  myself  to  the 
illusion:  identify  myself  with  the  charac- 
ters and  forget  everything  in  my  interest 
in  their  affairs. 

But  it  is  simply  beyond  me  to  feel  any 
illusion  concerning  a  love  scene  between 
two  supposedly  passionate  young  lovers, 
when  the  parts  are  sung  by  a  burly  Italian 
man  and  a  burly  German  woman,  both 
52 


Music  Is  Medicine  53 

over  forty  years  old  and  more  than  forty 
stone  in  weight. 

The  only  way  I  can  enjoy  the  acting 
of  opera  is  to  close  my  eyes. 

Furthermore,  I  like  to  be  able  to  start 
my  opera  and  stop  it  when  I  want  to;  to 
smoke  if  I  like,  or  lie  down  if  I  like ;  and, 
finally,  to  be  able  to  leave  when  I  get 
ready,  without  feeling  that  I  am  losing  any 
money  by  doing  so. 

In  other  words,  I  like  my  opera  on  a 
machine. 

Music  is  not  merely  entertainment:  it 
is  medicine. 

Pythagoras,  who  lived  many  hundred 
years  ago,  discovered  that.  He  was  able 
to  work  wonders  in  cases  of  violent  in- 
sanity with  no  other  remedy  than  soothing 
music. 

Esquirol,  the  celebrated  French  alien- 
ist, said:  "  Music  acts  most  powerfully 
on  the  physical  and  moral  nature,  and  I 
use  it  constantly  in  mental  disease.  It 
soothes  and  calms  the  patient's  mind,  and, 
though  it  may  not  cure,  it  is  a  most  pre- 
cious agent  and  ought  not  to  be  neglected." 


54  More  Power  to  You 

Gladstone,  attacked  by  occasional 
periods  of  nervous  exhaustion,  would  have 
his  favorite  hymns  sung  to  him. 

Herbert  Spencer,  when  neuralgia  shot 
him  through,  lay  down  and  ordered  soft 
music  played,  and  invariably  obtained  re- 
lief. 

And  I,  in  my  humble  fashion,  have  the 
same  experience. 

I  like  to  go  home  in  the  evening  before 
dinner,  and  lie  down  for  half  an  hour  and 
listen  to  my  favorite  music. 

If  I  need  stimulation,  there  are  stimulat- 
ing pieces;  if  relaxation,  there  are  selec- 
tions that  relax;  if  sleep,  there  are  songs 
that  carry  one  over  pleasant  pastures  and 
lay  one  down  under  fragrant  apple  trees 
to  peaceful  slumber. 

Music  is  a  mental  and  spiritual  mas- 
sage, or  a  bracing  cold  shower  bath,  ac- 
cording to  what  you  select.  I  personally 
do  not  care  to  take  my  spiritual  massage 
in  the  Metropolitan  Opera  House,  any 
more  than  I  would  care  to  have  my  hair 
cut  in  Madison  Square  Garden. 

Every  child  should  grow  up  in  a  home 


Music  Is  Medicine  55 

where  music  is  constantly  played.  Every 
experience  of  a  happy  youth  should  have 
some  particular  song  bound  up  with  it,  so 
that  the  playing  of  that  song  in  after  life 
will  reawaken  that  experience  and  cause 
it  to  be  lived  again. 

I  can  never  hear  Handel's  "  Largo  " 
without  living  over  one  of  the  quiet  Sun- 
days of  my  boyhood,  because  it  was  played 
in  our  house  almost  every  Sunday. 

"  Sweet  Alice,  Ben  Bolt,"  brings  back  a 
memory  to  me  that  is  peculiarly  intimate 
and  sweet.  There  are  a  hundred  favor- 
ites —  each  calling  its  own  particular  bit 
of  grand  opera  back  into  my  memory  —  a 
fragment  of  the  opera  of  my  own  life. 

Do  not  deny  your  child  the  blessed  min- 
istry of  music.  It  is  one  of  the  rarest 
gifts. 

Sweeten  his  soul  with  it.  Perhaps  you 
may  even  be  able  to  teach  him  to  love 
opera.  If  not,  you  can  at  least  teach  him 
to  love  music  in  his  own  home. 

And  he  will  be  in  good  company.  That 
is  the  way  the  prophet  Elisha  liked  his 
music.  Of  him  it  is  written  that,  when 


56  More  Power  to  You 

driven  to  utter  weariness  by  the  perplexi- 
ties of  his  business,  he  would  cry: 

"  But  now  bring  me  a  minstrel. 

"  And  it  came  to  pass,  when  the  min- 
strel played,  that  the  hand  of  the  Lord 
came  upon  him." 


XIV 

A   FEW   KIND   WORDS   FOR   BUSINESS 

I  GRADUATED  from  college  when 
muckraking  was  in  its  greatest  glory. 

The  magazines  and  newspapers  and  re- 
formers had  filled  our  youthful  minds  with 
so  much  distressing  information  that  we 
hardly  knew  whether  the  world  was  a  safe 
place  for  us  to  step  out  into  or  not. 

We  looked  askance  on  all  the  fellows 
in  college  whose  fathers  had  made  money. 
To  be  sure,  the  fathers  seemed  decent 
enough  old  codgers  when  they  visited  us 
at  the  fraternity  house.  But  we  felt  that 
something  wras  dark  and  bad  in  their  past 
somewhere. 

We  would  not  have  been  seen  walking 
on  the  street  with  John  D.  Rockefeller 
for  anything. 

I  remember  visiting  Washington  and 
looking  at  the  United  States  Senate.  I 
57 


^8  More  Power  to  You 

felt  as  if  I  were  inside  the  gates  of  Sing 
Sing. 

There  was  So-and-So  from  Texas:  we 
had  been  told  that  the  Oil  Trust  owned 
him.  There  was  So-and-So  from  Wiscon- 
sin: the  railroads  owned  him.  And  so  on. 

All  there  through  some  unholy  alliance. 

All  city  governments  were  corrupt;  all 
laws  were  passed  from  evil  motives;  all 
business  was  yoked  together  in  a  vast  un- 
seen network,  fashioned  and  fostered  to 
exploit  the  nation. 

A  business  man  was  a  being  without  con- 
science or  intelligence,  like  a  slot-machine. 
You  gave  him  a  nickel  and  he  gave  you  a 
nickel's  worth  of  goods. 

If  he  took  your  nickel  and  withheld  the 
goods,  then  he  was  a  successful  business 
man. 

Running  a  magazine  was  very  easy  in 
those  days. 

All  one  had  to  do  was  to  take  down  a 
map  of  the  United  States  and  place  his 
finger  on  any  spot  —  say  Owosso,  Michi- 
gan. Then  call  in  a  writer  and  say,  "  Get 


Kind  Words  for  Business        59 

on  the  train  and  go  out  and  see  what  is 
rotten  in  Owosso." 

Muckraking  did  some  good:  but  we 
have  come  to  realize  now  that  it  over- 
played its  hand. 

In  fact,  I  believe  it  could  be  shown  that 
the  greatest  force  for  righteousness  in  the 
United  States  to-day  is  nothing  more  nor 
less  than  the  once  maligned  BUSINESS. 

Certainly  Business  is  the  greatest  force 
in  America  working  for  temperance. 

The  young  men  of  half  a  century  ago 
were  pretty  heavy  drinkers.  The  young 
men  of  to-day  have  given  up  drink. 

Not  altogether  because  they  were  ar- 
gued into  it  or  scared  into  it:  but  also  be- 
cause they  know  that  it  destroys  their  effi- 
ciency and  cripples  their  progress  in  Busi- 
ness. 

Business  is  the  greatest  ally  and  pro- 
moter of  Honesty.  And  more  and  more 
I  have  come  to  feel  that  Honesty  is,  after 
all,  the  corner-stone  of  all  the  virtues. 

I  have  seen  a  business  man  refuse  to 
sign  a  document  that  contained  the  tiniest 


60  More  Power  to  You 

little  misstatement  —  a  misstatement  that 
probably  never  would  have  been  detected, 
and  might  have  meant  thousands  of  dol- 
lars in  profits  to  him. 

I  have  seen  a  man  whose  time  is  worth 
-  a  thousand  dollars  a  day  spend  half  an 
hour  editing  a  single  advertisement  —  so 
jealous  was  he  of  his  firm's  reputation 
for  never  making  a  false  claim  or  an  ex- 
travagant assertion. 

Business  has  taught  that  honesty  is  the 
best  policy;  and  millions  of  young  men 
have  been  made  better  citizens  by  first 
being  made  better  business  men. 

Nothing  has  impressed  me  more  than 
this:  Get  to  the  top  of  a  big  business 
enterprise,  and  nine  times  out  of  ten  you 
will  find  an  idealist. 

You  will  find  a  man  who  has  long  since 
ceased  to  be  interested  in  mere  money- 
making,  who  is  staying  in  business  because 
of  what  he  wants  his  business  to  do  for 
his  employees,  his  community,  and  his 
country. 

I  do  not  say  that  Business  is  perfect. 
Far  from  it. 


Kind  Words  for  Business        6 1 

But  I  do  say  that  the  time  is  past  when 
the  young  man  who  goes  into  business 
needs  to  feel  that  he  is  making  a  selfish 
choice  —  a  choice  that  cuts  him  off  from 
service  to  his  fellow  men. 

"Be  not  slothful  in  business"  said  St. 
Paul,  "  fervent  in  spirit;  serving  the 
Lord.99  f 

Many  a  man,  building  a  big  business  in 
America,  has,  as  a  by-product  of  his  build- 
ing, strengthened  the  character  and  lifted 
the  ideals  of  hundreds  of  his  associates, 
and  helped  in  the  regeneration  of  a  whole 
community. 

And  the  number  of  such  men  —  the 
idealists  of  BUSINESS  in  America  —  is  in- 
creasing very  fast. 


XV 

SOME   POOR  BLIND  FOLK   HAVE   NEVER 
SEEN  A  MIRACLE 

HERE    is    an    important    distinction 
that  many  people  overlook. 

God  made  the  world;  but  He  does  not 
make  your  world. 

He  provides  the  raw  materials,  and  out 
of  them  every  man  selects  what  he  wants 
and  builds  an  individual  world  for  him- 
self. 

The  fool  looks  over  the  wealth  of  ma- 
terial provided,  and  selects  a  few  plates 
of  ham  and  eggs,  a  few  pairs  of  trousers, 
a  few  dollar  bills  —  and  is  satisfied. 

The  wise  man  builds  his  world  out  of 
wonderful  sunsets,  and  thrilling  experi- 
ences, and  the  song  of  the  stars,  and  ro- 
mance and  miracles. 

Nothing  wonderful  ever  happens  in  the 
life  of  the  fool. 

62 


Speaking  of  Miracles  63 

A  primrose  by  a  river's  brim 
A  yellow  primrose  is  to  him, 
And  it  is  nothing  more. 

An  electric  light  is  simply  an  electric  light; 
a  telephone  is  only  a  telephone  —  nothing 
unusual  at  all. 

But  the  wise  man  never  ceases  to  won- 
der how  a  tiny  speck  of  seed,  apparently 
dead  and  buried,  can  produce  a  beautiful 
yellow  flower.  He  never  lifts  a  telephone 
receiver  or  switches  on  an  electric  light 
without  a  certain  feeling  of  awe. 

And  think  what  a  miracle  it  is,  this 
harnessing  of  electricity  to  the  service  of 
man! 

Who,  unless  his  sense  of  awe  had  grown 
blunt  through  constant  familiarity,  would 
believe  it? 

The  sun,  the  center  of  our  universe, 
goes  down  behind  the  western  horizon. 
I  touch  a  button,  and  presto !  I  have 
called  it  back  —  the  room  is  flooded  anew 
with  light. 

The  thunder  that  men  once  called  the 
voice  of  God  rolls  out  its  mighty  waves 
of  sound,  and  the  sound  carries  only  a  few 


64  More  Power  to  You 

score  miles.  But  I  —  puny  speck  upon 
the  face  of  the  earth  —  I  lift  a  little  in- 
strument: and,  behold,  my  whisper  is 
heard  a  thousand  miles  away. 

Prometheus  stole  fire  from  the  gods  and 
brought  it  down  to  earth.  For  that  crime 
the  gods  chained  him  to  a  lonely  rock  and 
sent  a  huge  bird  to  feed  upon  his  vitals. 
Each  night  the  wound  healed,  and  each 
day  it  was  torn  open  again. 

That  was  the  punishment  of  the  man 
who  dared  to  wrest  away  the  richest  treas- 
ure of  the  gods. 

But  fire  —  the  treasure  of  the  gods  — > 
has  almost  disappeared  out  of  our  daily 
life :  we  scorn  it. 

Do  we  want  heat?  We  press  a  but- 
ton: and  lo,  heat,  invisible,  silent,  all- 
pervasive,  flows  into  our  homes  over  a 
copper  wire. 

Do  we  need  power?  We  have  but  to 
press  another  switch,  and  giants  come  to 
us  over  the  same  slender  roadway. 
Clothed  in  invisible  garments,  they  cleanse 
our  homes,  wash  our  clothes,  crank  our 
automobiles  —  do  everything  that  once 


Speaking  of  Miracles  65 

taxed  the  strength  of  men  and  hurried 
women  into  unlovely  old  age. 

Don't  let  your  life  become  a  prosaic 
affair:  don't  let  familiarity  with  the  mar- 
vels about  you  breed  thoughtlessness  and 
contempt. 

Let  the  fool  build  his  world  out  of  mere 
food  and  drink  and  clothes:  you  fashion 
yours  out  of  marvelous  experiences:  fur- 
nish and  decorate  it  with  miracles. 

Exercise  your  mind  in  the  wholesome 
activity  of  wonder:  train  your  soul  to  rev- 
erent awe. 

If  you  had  stood  with  Moses  on  the 
shore  of  the  Red  Sea,  and  had  seen  it 
divide  to  let  the  children  of  Israel  pass 
over,  you  would  have  had  no  difficulty  in 
recognizing  that  as  a  miracle. 

But  every  night  when  the  sun  goes  down, 
a  man  stands  in  a  power-house  in  your 
city  and  throws  a  switch,  and  instantly  the 
city  and  the  country  for  miles  around  are 
flooded  with  sunshine. 

And  you  say  to  yourself  casually: 
"  Oh,  I  see  the  lights  are  on." 


XVI 

I    REASSURE    A    MOTHER 

A  MOTHER  writes  me  about  her  son's 
reading.     Among  other  things,  she 
says  : 

In  spite  of  all  I  can  do  or  say,  he  insists  on 
reading  stories.  How  can  I  correct  this  habit? 

Frankly,  madam,  I  do  not  know. 

It  is  about  as  easy  to  cure  a  boy  of  eat- 
ing as  it  is  to  destroy  his  love  for  good 
stories. 

Centuries  before  there  was  any  writ- 
ing, story-tellers  drifted  about  from  vil- 
lage to  village,  gathering  the  people  to- 
gether and  telling  them  stories. 

The  love  of  fiction  is  as  old  as  that  — 
older  than  recorded  history,  older  even 
than  civilization.  It  can  not  be  rooted 
out:  its  roots  run  back  too  far. 

And  why  should  you  want  to  root  it 
out? 

The  greatest  Teacher  that  ever  lived 
66 


I  Reassure  a  Mother  67 

spent  half  His  time  telling  stories  to  His 
disciples.  "  Without  a  parable  [a  story] 
He  taught  them  nothing."  These  stories 
have  transformed  humanity. 

One  great  story  written  in  our  own  coun- 
try, "  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin,"  so  stirred 
men's  hearts  that  they  said,  "  Slavery  must 

go." 

Good  stories  will  not  hurt  your  boy: 
they  may,  if  he  is  the  right  kind  of  boy, 
inspire  him  to  real  achievement. 

And  they  will  do  something  else  for 
him,  equally  important.  They  will  de- 
velop his  imagination. 

We  have  too  little  regard  for  the  high 
value  of  the  imagination,  we  Americans. 
We  are  too  matter-of-fact.  We  forget 
that  all  great  inventions,  all  great  discov- 
eries, all  great  achievements  in  science  or 
business,  came  to  pass  because  some  man 
first  had  imagination  enough  to  conceive 
them. 

Many  men  have  been  hit  on  the  head 
by  a  falling  apple.  Newton,  when  the 
apple  hit  him,  had  imagination  enough  to 
formulate  the  law  of  gravitation. 


68  More  Power  to  You 

Many  men  have  been  burned  by  their 
wives'  tea-kettles.  Watt  had  imagination 
enough  to  conceive  the  steam-engine. 

Look  through  the  pages  of  history,  and 
you  will  discover  that  the  leaders  of  men 
have  been  those  who  could  dream  great 
dreams  and  carry  them  out  —  the  men  of 
powerful,  intelligent  imagination. 

Because  this  is  true,  the  editor  of  a  mag- 
azine that  prints  stories  has  a  responsi- 
bility that  he  must  take  seriously  if  he  is 
any  sort  of  man  at  all.  He  is  intrusted 
with  the  duty  of  stimulating  the  imagina- 
tion of  thousands  of  children  of  mothers 
like  you. 

He  may,  if  he  choose,  publish  stories 
whose  appeal  is  to  the  baser  side  of  the 
imagination  —  and  even  achieve  a  certain 
sort  of  circulation  increase  for  his  maga- 
zine by  so  doing.  Or  he  may  regard 
every  mother  among  his  readers  as  if  she 
were  his  own  mother,  and  every  mother's 
son  as  a  younger  brother. 

You  need  not  concern  yourself  because 
your  boy  likes  stories.  But  are  the  stories 


/  Reassure  a  Moth^by 

he  reads  the  right  kind  of  stories  —  do 
they  appeal  to  his  imagination  on  its  best 
and  highest  side? 

That  is  the  important  question  for  you. 


XVII 

IF  YOU   WANT   TO   KNOW   WHETHER 

YOUR    BRAIN    IS    FLABBY,    FEEL 

OF   YOUR   LEGS 

THIS  is  one  of  the  greatest  tragedies 
of  modern  life.  Men  are  forget- 
ting how  to  walk. 

They  travel  by  taxi-cabs  and  street  cars; 
they  travel  by  automobile;  they  project 
their  personalities  over  a  telephone  wire. 

But  they  do  not  walk. 

There  is  a  double  loss  in  this. 

A  loss  in  health,  first.  Most  of  the 
diseases  of  modern  men  originate  in  the 
intestines.  Formerly  men  and  women 
walked  enough  to  keep  the  stomach  mus- 
cles firm,  the  intestines  healthfully  agi- 
tated. 

Now  men  —  and  women  even  more  so 
—  sit  all  day  slumped  in. 

Germs  settle  down  inside  them  gladly; 
TO 


//  Your  Brain  Is  Flabby        71 

and  Death,  his  work  made  easy  for  him, 
laughs. 

There  is  another  loss,  equally  great. 
A  loss  in  mental  keenness  and  mental 
wealth. 

Did  you  ever  take  a  walk  in  the  country 
with  some  one  who  knows  really  how  to 
walk? 

Some  one  of  the  type  of  the  naturalist 
Linnaeus,  for  instance  ? 

Linnasus  walked  into  Oland,  and  found 
the  lands  of  the  farmers  ruined  by  sand 
blown  from  the  beaches. 

He  discovered  that  the  roots  of  a  cer- 
tain beach  grass  were  long  and  firm:  he 
taught  the  farmers  to  sow  that  grass  along 
the  beach,  and  so  preserved  their  lands 
from  ruin. 

He  walked  into  Thorne,  and  found  that 
at  a  certain  period  in  every  year  the  cattle 
fell  sick  and  died. 

It  was  a  curse,  the  people  said  —  the 
act  of  angry  spirits. 

But  Linnaeus,  examining  the  pastures, 
uncovered  a  noxious  weed,  and  showed 
the  farmers  how  the  work  of  one  laborer 


72  More  Power  to  You 

for  a  few  days  every  season  would  root  it 
out. 

In  his  walks  he  examined  and  cata- 
logued 8,000  plants,  vegetables,  and 
flowers. 

How  many  plants,  vegetables,  and 
flowers  do  you  think  you  could  identify  if 
you  were  to  see  them  in  their  native  state  ? 

"  Few  men,"  said  Dr.  Johnson,  "  know 
how  to  take  a  walk." 

It  was  so  in  his  day.  It  is  even  more 
true  now. 

But  those  favored  few  enjoy  a  glorious 
and  mysterious  privilege. 

To  discover  where  the  violets  first 
bloom  in  the  spring  — 

To  be  able  to  tell  directions  in  the 
woods,  by  knowing  that  large  pine  trees 
bear  more  numerous  branches  on  their 
southern  side  — 

Or  that  grass  grows  on  the  south  side 
of  ant-hills  and  whortle-berries  on  the 
north  — 

To  learn  to  greet  the  wild  flowers  by 
name  — 

There  are  few  pleasures  more  richly  sat- 


//  Your  Brain  Is  Flabby        73 

isfying;  none  that  pay  larger  dividends  in 
health. 

The  man  who  goes  into  the  country 
once  a  week  is  a  better  citizen  than  the 
man  who  never  goes,  even  though  his  eyes 
see  nothing  more  inspiring  on  his  walk 
than  a  golf  ball. 

But  far  more  to  be  envied  is  that  little 
inner  circle  of  Nature's  favorites  who 
speak  her  language  intimately;  who  read 
her  thoughts  in  her  woods  and  brooks  and 
flowers. 

"  You  shall  never  break  down  in  a 
speech,"  said  a  great  English  statesman, 
"  on  the  day  that  you  have  walked  twelve 
miles." 

Flabby  legs  usually  mean  flabby  brains. 

If  you  would  think  clearly,  speak  force- 
fully, work  effectively,  get  out  into  the 
country  when  you  can  —  and  walk. 


XVIII 

DO   BABIES   LIKE   YOU  ?      THAT  *S   A 
PRETTY    GOOD    TEST 

*T  TOW  do  you  like  babies?"  some 
JL  JL  woman  asked  Charles  Lamb. 

"  B-b-oiled,   madam/'   stuttered  Lamb. 

In  the  beginning  of  the  race  nobody 
except  mothers  liked  babies. 

The  records  of  civilization's  slow  prog- 
ress are  written  in  babies'  blood. 

Babies  had  no  rights:  they  were  a  neces- 
sary evil. 

In  the  South  Sea  Islands,  when  either 
parent  died,  the  children  were  slain  and 
buried  also,  to  wait  on  the  parent  in  the 
other  world. 

In  China  it  is  estimated  that  40  per 
cent,  of  the  girl  babies  in  the  provinces 
of  the  interior  were  drowned. 

In  India,  when  a  girl  baby  was  born,  the 
mother  put  opium  on  her  breasts,  and  the 
74 


Do  Babies  Like  You?          75 

baby,  inhaling  it  with  the  mother's  milk, 
died. 

Inside  the  great  brass  statue  of  Moloch 
a  roaring  fire  was  built  on  holy  days. 
And  into  the  seething  arms  of  the  god 
women  hurled  their  screaming  infants. 

Even  the  Greeks,  who  established  a 
civilization  higher  than  that  of  any  other 
ancient  people,  regularly  u  exposed  "  their 
undesired  infants  on  the  mountain-sides. 

And  Socrates,  their  greatest  man,  saw 
nothing  in  the  practice  to  condemn. 

Little  by  little,  through  the  succeeding 
centuries,  the  baby  has  been  coming  into 
his  own. 

Romulus,  who  founded  Rome,  took  the 
first  forward  step;  the  Emperor  Hadrian 
made  another  advance. 

But  it  was  Christianity  that  discovered 
the  baby. 

All  motherhood  became  sanctified  in 
the  worship  paid  to  Mary,  the  mother  of 
Jesus. 

All  childhood  was  ennobled  by  the  birth 
in  the  manger. 

To-day  we  measure  the  civilization  of  a 


j6  More  Power  to  You 

nation  by  the  question :  How  does  it  treat 
its  babies? 

And  the  civilization  of  an  individual 
can  be  measured  by  the  same  test. 

Do  you  consider  babies  a  nuisance? 
Do  you  dislike  them?  Do  they  fear  you? 

Then  —  though  your  culture  may  be- 
long to  the  twentieth  century  —  your  heart 
still  lingers  in  the  first. 

It  ?s  a  question  how  much  any  one  man 
influences  the  world  through  his  business 
life  or  his  public  acts. 

Alexander  conquered  the  world.  And, 
before  his  ashes  were  cold,  his  kingdom 
began  to  break  up. 

But  one  little  section  of  the  human  race 
is  given  into  your  care  irrevocably: 

Your  babies. 

What  you  make  them  they  will  be. 
Through  them  and  their  descendants  you 
can  perpetuate  your  influence  to  the  end 
of  time. 

If  there  is  a  baby  in  your  home, 
nursing-bottles  ought  to  be  more  impor- 
tant to  you  than  stocks  and  bonds. 

You   ought  to   know  more   about  the 


Do  Babies  Like  You?  77 

various  kinds  of  baby  foods  than  you  know 
about  golf. 

Your  business  is  important  because  it 
makes  your  living. 

But  your  home  is  all-important  because 
there  you  make  lives. 

In  it  are  molded  the  characters  of  the 
future  proprietors  of  the  earth :  your  chil- 
dren —  the  most  important  citizens  in  the 
world. 


XIX 

NOW  WILL   YOU    STOP   THAT   SUNDAY 
WORK? 

THIS  is  a  "  scientific  "  age. 
The  way  to  get  a  man  married  is 
not  to  introduce  him  to  a  pretty  girl. 

You  must  prove  to  him  by  statistics 
that  married  men  are  more  successful  and 
live  longer  than  single  men. 

Then  he  goes  about  it  scientifically. 

It  used  to  be  sufficient  merely  to  tell  a 
child,  "  Remember  the  Sabbath  day,  to 
keep  it  holy.  In  it  thou  shalt  not  do  any 
work." 

But  the  modern  child  —  and  man  — 
asks,  Why? 

Well,  here  is  one  reason  why  —  a 
scientific  reason. 

Dr.   E.   G.    Martin,   of  the   Harvard 
Medical   School,    selected   nine    first-year 
medical  students,  all  in  good  health,  and 
78 


Stop  That  Sunday  Work        79 

tested  them  every  day  for  eight  weeks  with 
electric  currents. 

Each  day  he  recorded  the  smallest  shock 
that  they  could  feel.  The  smaller  the 
shock  they  could  feel,  the  higher  their 
sensitiveness.  A  high  sensitiveness  means 
high  nervous  efficiency. 

You  know  that  from  your  own  experi- 
ence. 

You  have  been  so  "  dead  tired "  you 
could  not  taste  the  food  you  were  eating; 
so  tired  that  you  hardly  felt  a  blow  or  a 
prick  which  would  otherwise  have  caused 
you  severe  pain.  Your  sensitiveness  was 
low. 

And  Dr.  Martin  discovered  this: 

There  was  an  unmistakable  tendency  for  the 
sensitiveness  to  be  at  its  highest  at  the  beginning 
of  the  week  and  to  sink  steadily  from  day  to  day 
until  the  week's  end,  reaching  the  lowest  point 
on  Saturday.  With  the  return  of  Monday  fol- 
lowing the  Sunday  recess  the  sensitiveness  was 
back  at  its  former  high  point. 

The  chart  on  the  next  page  shows  the 
results  of  the  experiment: 


80  More  Power  to  You 


110 


100 


M        Tu  W  TH  F  S 

It  shows  what  happens  to  your  reservoir 
of  nervous  energy  every  week. 

Monday  you  are  keen,  alert,  ready  for 
anything. 

Tuesday  you  are  not  quite  so  fit. 

Thursday  and  Friday  and  Saturday  you 
slump  off  very  fast,  each  day  a  little  less 
fresh  than  the  day  before.  And  by  Sat- 
urday night  you  are  dead  tired. 

Then,  if  you  rest  Sunday,  you  are  back 
to  high-water  mark  again  Monday  morn- 
ing. If  you  do  not  rest,  you  go  down  and 
down. 


Stop  That  Sunday  Work        81 

The  results  [says  Dr.  Martin]  show  that  the 
repose  of  a  single  night  following  a  day  of  toil 
does  not  afford  complete  restoration  of  the  im- 
paired nervous  tissues;  and  furthermore  that  the 
longer  period  furnished  by  the  Sunday  recess 
gives,  under  ordinary  conditions,  the  longer  time 
needed  for  the  expulsion  of  the  accumulated  fa- 
tigue products  and  the  recovery  of  efficiency. 

Arnold  Bennett,  in  "  The  Truth  About 
an  Author,"  tells  how,  after  working 
seven  days  a  week  for  several  years,  he 
learned  that  a  day  of  complete  rest  greatly 
added  to  his  efficiency. 

The  man  who  carries  his  work  home  with  him 
and  dwells  on  it  in  the  time  devoted  ostensibly  to 
rest  [concludes  Dr.  Martin]  is  defeating  the  very 
purpose  he  seeks  —  increased  efficiency. 

"  Remember  the  Sabbath  day,"  says 
modern  Science. 

But  the  Bible  said  it  thousands  of  years 
ago. 

Some  day,  when  you  have  had  enough 
scientific  proof,  you  will  begin  to  believe 
that  there  are  quite  a  good  many  things 
in  the  Bible  worth  knowing  and  believing. 


I 


XX 

ASK   ANY   SUCCESSFUL   MAN 

SHOULD  like  to  have  this  carved  on 
my  tombstone : 


Here  lies  a  man  who  edited  a  magazine:  he 
made  many  mistakes,  but  we  forgive  him  for 
them,  because  year  after  year  he  preached  Thrift 
to  his  readers,  he  encouraged  several  million  peo- 
ple to  save  money. 

We  are  not  a  thrifty  people,  as  com- 
pared with  other  nations. 

Belgium  before  the  war  was  known  as 
a  "  country  without  paupers  " ;  of  France's 
10,000,000  voters  nine  tenths  are  owners 
of  government  bonds.  There  are  12,- 
500,000  savings  accounts  in  France,  and 
half  of  them  little  ones  —  less  than  $4. 

But  only  one  in  ten  of  us  have  savings 
accounts:  the  rest  of  us  are  "  good 
fellows." 

82 


Ask  Any  Successful  Man       83 

I  attended  the  funeral  of  a  "  good  fel- 
low "  recently.  He  had  always  "  lived 
up  to  his  income.'*  When  the  company 
for  which  he  worked  was  reorganized  ten 
years  ago,  the  president  said  to  him: 
"  Have  you  a  thousand  dollars?  " 

A  thousand  dollars  put  into  that  busi- 
ness ten  years  ago  would  be  earning  a  com- 
petence for  his  widow  to-day.  But  the 
u  good  f ellow  "  did  not  have  it:  he  had 
never  learned  to  save.  And  now  we  are 
raising  a  fund  to  buy  his  daughter  a  piano, 
so  that  she  can  give  music  lessons. 

I  came  away  from  the  funeral  with  an- 
other man  whose  salary  has  never  been 
as  large  as  the  "  good  fellow's."  We 
rode  in  his  automobile. 

"  Do  you  know  how  I  paid  for  this  automo- 
bile ?"  he  asked.  "Out  of  the  dividends  that 
came  to  me  last  year  from  my  savings.  When 
I  was  getting  eighteen  dollars  a  week,  my  wife 
took  two  of  it  every  week  and  put  it  into  the 
savings  bank,  where  we  could  n't  touch  it. 
When  I  was  raised  to  twenty-five,  she  raised  the 
savings  fund  to  five  a  week ;  and  so  on.  I  Jm 
forty-seven  years  old  now.  I  Ve  never  had  a  big 


84  More  Power  to  You 

salary,  as  you  know;  but  I  could  retire  to-mor- 
row, if  I  wanted  to,  and  have  more  than  thirty 
dollars  a  week  in  dividends  from  the  money  I  Ve 
saved.  I  tell  you,  I  don't  know  anything  that 
makes  a  man  face  the  world  with  so  much  confi- 
dence as  the  knowledge  that  he  has  made  himself 
independent  of  it." 

There  you  have  them  side  by  side  —  the 
"  good  fellow  "  and  the  "  wise  fellow." 
All  of  us  belong  in  one  class  or  the  other. 
Which  class  are  you  in? 

"If  you  want  to  know  whether  you  are  going 
to  be  a  success  or  a  failure  in  life,"  said  James  J. 
Hill,  "  you  can  easily  find  out.  The  test  is  sim- 
ple and  infallible.  Are  you  able  to  save  money? 
If  not,  drop  out.  You  will  lose.  You  may  not 
think  it,  but  you  will  lose  as  sure  as  you  live. 
The  seed  of  success  is  not  in  you." 

There  is  not  a  single  man,  woman,  or 
child  in  America  who  can  not  save  some 
money  if  he  or  she  will  set  out  de- 
terminedly to  do  it. 

"  Ah,"  you  object.  "  How  can  you  say 
that?  You  do  not  know  my  circum- 
stances." 


Ask  Any  Successful  Man        85 

No,  I  do  not.  But  if  circumstances  dic- 
tate your  life,  this  is  not  written  for  you. 
You  will  not  succeed  anyway:  you  do  not 
count. 

"  Circumstances!  "  exclaimed  Napoleon. 
"  I  make  circumstances." 


XXI 

IF    YOU    CAN    GIVE   YOUR   SON    ONLY   ONE 
GIFT,    LET   IT  BE   ENTHUSIASM 

A  LITTLE  while  ago  I  was  in  charge 
of  a  large  organization  of  salesmen. 

My  chief  sent  me  to  a  Western  city  to 
appoint  a  manager  for  that  territory. 

There  were  two  candidates.  We  had 
their  records  in  detail,  but  we  had  never 
met  either  of  them.  I  was  to  look  them 
over,  form  my  judgment,  and  appoint  the 
better  man. 

I  met  one  man  in  Cincinnati,  the  other 
in  St.  Louis. 

The  man  in  Cincinnati  said  to  me: 
"  What  does  this  position  pay?"  I  told 
him.  "  That  is  more  than  I  am  getting 
here,"  he  said,  "  and  I  should  like  the  job. 
Every  man  wants  to  better  himself  when 
lie  can." 

The  St.  Louis  man  did  not  wait  for  me 
86 


Give  Your  Son  Enthusiasm       87 

to  arrive  in  the  city.  He  found  out  on 
what  train  I  was  coming,  rode  out  on  the 
line,  and  surprised  me  by  walking  down 
the  aisle  of  my  car.  He  began  to  talk. 
He  told  me  about  himself,  his  training  and 
his  selling  experience.  He  had  drawn  up 
plans  in  detail  for  the  development  of  our 
territory ;  he  told  me  how  many  men  he  ex- 
pected to  have  working  by  the  end  of  the 
year,  and  just  how  he  thought  he  could 
increase  our  volume  of  business. 

I  had  to  hire  him,  finally,  in  order  to 
get  a  chance  to  go  to  bed  at  night.  And 
in  his  enthusiasm  he  forgot  to  ask  me 
and  I  forgot  to  tell  him  what  the  salary 
would  be. 

The  first  man  had  wanted  a  better  job, 
which  is  commendable  enough.  But  I 
hired  the  man  who  was  enthusiastic  about 
the  opportunity. 

Napoleon's  adversaries  used  to  speak 
of  him  as  "  the  100,000  man" — mean- 
ing that  his  spirit  infused  into  an  army 
was  equal  to  an  additional  100,000  troops. 

They  criticized  his  tactics;  they  accused 
him  of  disregarding  all  the  rules  of  sue- 


88  More  Power  to  You 

cessful  warfare :  yet  he  won  and  they  lost. 
Because  his  enthusiasm  carried  his  soldiers 
to  impossible  achievements. 

We  are  told  a  great  deal  about  the 
necessity  for  controlling  our  emotions,  for 
being  self-contained,  for  not  letting  our 
enthusiasm  sweep  us  off  our  feet. 

Much  of  this  advice  is  very  wise. 

But  don't  forget  that  the  Indians 
were  very  self-contained.  They  controlled 
their  emotions  so  successfully  that  it  was  a 
point  of  pride  among  them  never  to  ex- 
hibit pleasure  or  pain  or  love  or  en- 
thusiasm. 

And  the  Indians  used  to  own  this  coun- 
try—  and  do  not  own  it  any  more. 

It  was  taken  away  from  them  — 

By  men  like  Columbus,  who  believed  so 
enthusiastically  that  the  world  was  round, 
in  an  age  when  other  people  believed  it 
flat,  that  he  risked  tumbling  off  into  space 
in  order  to  discover  a  new  continent. 

By  men  like  Fulton,  who  believed  that 
steam  could  be  made  to  run  a  boat  in  spite 
of  wind  or  tide. 

By  men   like    Marcus   Whitman,    who 


Give  Your  Son  Enthusiasm       89 

was  so  enthusiastic  about  the  great  un- 
known West  that  he  rode  alone  across  the 
continent  to  add  the  Western  empire  to 
our  country. 

By  men  like  James  J.  Hill,  whose  en- 
thusiasm could  picture  towns  and  farms 
where  other  men  saw  only  useless  prairies. 

Take  your  son  on  trips;  show  him 
the  big  men  of  his  own  time,  such  as  the 
President  of  the  United  States;  and  the 
great  sights  of  the  world,  such  as  Niagara 
Falls. 

Encourage  him  to  express  his  enthu- 
siasm and  delight.  Let  him  believe  that 
the  world  is  full  of  wonderful  things,  and 
he  himself  full  of  splendid  possibilities. 

He  can  learn  self-repression  in  later 
years:  but  enthusiasm,  once  lost,  is  lost 
forever. 

"  Men  are  nothing,"  said  Montaigne, 
"  until  they  are  excited." 

And  Montaigne  was  right. 

Of  two  boys  with  equal  ability,  the  one 
who  can  be  excited  about  his  work,  day 
after  day  and  year  after  year,  is  the  boy 
that  is  going  to  win. 


XXII 

HAVE  YOU   CEASED  TO   STUDY? 
IF   SO,    GOOD   NIGHT 

A  MAN  named  Brown  and  a  man 
named  Black  graduated  from  high 
school  and  entered  business  in  New  York 
at  the  same  time. 

Both  made  rapid  progress.  At  twenty- 
five  each  of  them  was  drawing  $2,500  a 
year. 

"  Coming  men,"  said  their  friends. 
"  If  they  are  so  far  along  at  twenty-five, 
where  will  they  be  at  fifty?  " 

Black  went  on.  At  fifty  he  is  president 
of  his  company,  with  an  income  of 
$25,000  a  year. 

But  something  happened  to  Brown.  He 
never  fulfilled  the  large  promise  of  his 
youth:  at  fifty  he  had  hardly  advanced  be- 
yond his  thirty  mark. 

What  was  it  that  happened  to  these  two 

00 


Have  You  Ceased  to  Study?       91 

men,  of  equal  education  and  —  so  far  as 
the  world  could  judge  —  equal  ability? 

I  will  tell  you. 

Brown  became  satisfied.  He  ceased  to 
study:  which  means  that  he  ceased  to 
grow. 

Black  has  told  me  that  when  he  reached 
$5,000  a  year  he  said  to  himself:  "  I  have 
made  a  good  start.  Nothing  can  stop  me 
if  I  keep  my  health  and  keep  growing.  I 
must  study,  study,  study:  I  must  be  the 
best  informed  man  on  our  business  in  the 
United  States.1' 

There  is  the  difference.  One  stayed  in 
school:  one  did  not. 

The  position  you  attain  before  you  are 
twenty-five  years  old  is  of  no  particular 
credit  to  you.  You  gained  that  simply  on 
the  education  your  parents  gave  you  — 
education  that  cost  you  no  sacrifice. 

But  the  progress  you  make  in  the  world 
after  twenty-five  —  that  is  progress  that 
you  must  make  by  educating  yourself.  It 
will  be  in  proportion  to  the  amount  of 
study  you  give  to  your  work  in  excess  of 
the  amount  the  other  man  gives. 


92  More  Power  to  You 

Analyze   any  successful  man   and  you 
will  find  these  three  great  facts : 
He  had  an  aim: 

Lord  Campbell  wrote  to  his  father,  as  an 
excuse  for  not  coming  home  over  the  holi- 
days: 

"  To  have  any  chance  of  success,  I  must  be 
more  steady  than  other  men.  I  must  be  in  cham- 
bers when  they  are  at  the  theater:  I  must  study 
when  they  are  asleep:  I  must,  above  all,  remain 
in  town  when  they  are  in  the  country." 

He  worked: 

"  I  have  worked,"  said  Daniel  Webster,  "  for 
mose  than  twelve  hours  a  day  for  fifty  years." 

He  studied: 

Vice-President  Henry  Wilson  was  born  in  the 
direst  poverty. 

"  Want  sat  by  my  cradle,"  he  says.  "  I  know 
what  it  is  to  ask  my  mother  for  bread  when 
she  had  none  to  give.  I  left  home  when  ten 
years  of  age,  and  served  an  apprenticeship  of 
eleven  years,  receiving  one  month's  schooling 
each  year,  and  at  the  end  of  eleven  years  of  hard 
work  a  yoke  of  oxen  and  six  sheep,  which  brought 
me  $84." 


Have  You  Ceased  to  Study?       93 

Yet  in  those  eleven  years  of  grueling 
labor  he  found  time  to  read  and  study 
more  than  one  hundred  books. 

Really  big  men  check  themselves  up 
each  autumn,  at  the  beginning  of  a  new 
business  year. 

"  This  year,"  they  say,  "  I  am  going  to 
master  one  new  subject.  I  am  going  to 
pursue  such  and  such  studies,  which  will 
increase  my  ability  and  earning  power." 

The  bigger  they  are,  the  longer  they 
keep  themselves  in  school.  Gladstone 
took  up  a  new  language  after  he  had 
passed  seventy. 

Have  you  left  school? 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  did  you  grow  men- 
tally last  year  at  all?  What  definite  sub- 
ject are  you  planning  to  devote  your  eve- 
nings to  this  year? 

"  As  a  rule,"  said  Disraeli,  "  the  most 
successful  man  in  life  is  the  man  who  has 
the  most  information." 

How  much  will  you  increase  your  stock 
of  useful  information  in  the  next  business 
year? 


XXIII 

A   MAN  ASKS,    u  WHAT   IS  YOUR 
FAVORITE   BOOK?  " 

OF  course,  no  man  wants  the  same 
book  for  every  mood,  any  more 
than  he  wants  the  same  food  for  every 
meal  or  the  same  medicine  for  every 
disease. 

But  the  book  to  which  I  come  back 
again  and  again  was  written  several  hun- 
dred years  ago. 

It  is  called  Ecclesiastes:  you  will  find 
it  about  the  middle  of  the  Bible.  Fred- 
erick the  Great  called  it  the  "  Book  of 
Kings,"  and  said  every  monarch  should  re- 
read it  constantly. 

He  should  have  said  every  man;  for 
every  man  is  the  monarch  of  his  own  life. 
And  this  is  the  book  of  life,  written  by  a 
king  who  had  everything  that  life  can  give. 

04 


What  Is  Your  Favorite  Book?       95 

It  is  the  answer  to  the  eternal  question: 
"  What's  the  use  ?" 

What  profit  hath  a  man  of  all  his  labor 

Which  he  taketh  under  the  sun? 

One  generation  passeth  away, 

And  another  generation  cometh: 

But  the  earth  abideth  for  ever.  .  .  . 

All  the  rivers  run  into  the  sea; 

Yet  the  sea  is  not  full ; 

Unto  the  place  from  whence  the  rivers  come. 

Thither  they  return  again.  .  .  . 

The  eye  is  not  satisfied  with  seeing, 

Nor  the  ear  filled  with  hearing. 

The  thing  that  hath  been, 

It  is  that  which  shall  be; 

And  that  which  is  done 

Is  that  which  shall  be  done: 

And  there  is  no  new  thing  under  the  sun. 

In  other  words,  life  is  not  just  one  thing 
after  another.  It  is  the  same  thing  again 
and  again.  Get  up,  worry  and  work;  eat> 
lie  down,  sleep.  What 's  the  use  of  it  all? 

The  man  who  is  never  tempted  to  ask 
that  question  has  no  imagination. 

Solomon,  the  writer,  determined  to  find 
out  what  is  worth  while  in  life. 


96  More  Power  to  You 

Is  wisdom  the  thing  greatly  to  be  de- 
sired? He  made  himself  the  wisest  man 
in  the  world,  and  discovered  —  what  ? 

In  much  wisdom  is  much  grief: 
And  he  that  increaseth  knowledge 
Increaseth  sorrow. 

From  wisdom  he  turned  to  mirth,  only 
to  find,  as  an  end  of  living,  that  "  this  also 
is  vanity." 

He  sought  to  give  his  heart  unto  wine, 
and  "to  lay  hold  on  folly":  and  in  this 
too  there  was  no  satisfaction. 

Perhaps,  then,  he  said  to  himself,  per- 
haps work  is  the  one  thing  worth  while. 
To  achieve  something  great  —  to  leave  a 
monument  for  posterity  to  wonder  at. 

I  made  me  great  works;  I  builded  me  houses; 
I  planted  me  vineyards:  .  .  . 

Then  I  looked  on  all  the  works  that  my  hands 
had  wrought,  and  on  the  labor  that  I  had 
labored  to  do:  and,  behold,  all  was  vanity  and 
vexation  of  spirit,  and  there  was  no  profit  under 
the  sun. 

Wisdom,  mirth,  work,  fame  — 


What  Is  Your  Favorite  Book?       97 

The  man  who  has  not  at  some  time 
sought  each  one  as  a  solution  of  the  puzzle 
of  life  has  in  him  no  spirit  of  adventure. 

But  none  of  them  satisfied  Solomon. 

What,  then,  is  the  answer  to  the  riddle? 
What  will  satisfy  the  soul  of  man  ?  What 
will  make  his  life  seem  to  have  been  worth 
while  when  he  comes  to  give  it  up  ? 

The  answer  is  in  the  great  last  chapter, 
which  begins : 

Remember  now  thy  Creator 
In  the  days  of  thy  youth, 
While  the  evil  days  come  not, 
Nor  the  years  draw  nigh, 
When  thou  shalt  say, 
I  have  no  pleasure  in  them. 

To  live  straight  and  simply;  to  do  a 
little  kindness  as  one  moves  along;  to  love 
useful  work;  to  raise  a  worthy  family; 
and  to  leave  the  world  a  little  better 
than  you  found  it  —  to  do  one's  daily 
duty  in  simple  reverence  —  this  is  the  final 
answer. 

And  the  man  who,  having  passed 
through  his  periods  of  questioning,  and 


98  More  Power  to  You 

made  his  false  excursions  into  the  varied 

by-paths,    does  not   come  finally    to    this 

true  road,  has  failed  to  find  real  great" 
ness. 


XXIV 

THIS    HOARY-HEADED    FALSEHOOD    HAS 
LIVED   LONG   ENOUGH 

THERE  are  a  few  hoary-headed 
falsehoods  that  have  lived  too  long. 

One  of  them  is  this : 

"  Ninety-five  per  cent,  of  the  men  who 
go  into  business  in  this  country  fail." 

I  have  heard  speakers  get  that  off  at 
dinners  with  ponderous  gravity:  I  have 
seen  it  again  and  again  in  magazine 
articles. 

Recently  a  statistician  has  examined  the 
records  of  business  success  and  failure  in 
this  country,  and  has  proved  conclusively 
that  the  statement  is  not  true. 

Ninety-five  per  cent,  of  the  men  who  en- 
ter business  do  not  fail;  and,  of  those  who 
do  fail,  a  good  many  start  over  again,  pay 
up  their  debts,  and  die  successful. 

We  have  fallen  into  the  habit  of  talking 

99 


loo          More  Power  to  You 

about  success  as  if  it  were  something  ex- 
ceptional. 

In  America  success  is  not  the  exception 
—  it  is  the  rule. 

I  am  continually  amazed  by  the 
mediocre  men  —  men  of  one  idea,  men 
who  bore  you  to  death  if  you  have  to  talk 
with  them  half  an  hour  —  who  win  out. 

Five  years  ago  a  group  of  us  used  to 
wag  our  heads  sadly  about  the  fate  of 
poor  Horton.  He  was  buried  alive  in  a 
great  corporation.  To  be  sure,  we  did  not 
think  he  deserved  much  of  the  world:  he 
had  no  genius,  only  a  dogged  sort  of 
loyalty. 

The  other  day  I  received  an  engraved 
notice  that  Horton  had  been  made  general 
manager  of  his  concern. 

I  picked  up  the  latest  copy  of  a  trade 
paper  yesterday.  On  the  cover  was  the 
name  of  a  poor  stick  I  used  to  know. 

We  wondered,  when  he  married,  how 
he  could  ever  find  a  job  that  would  pay 
him  enough  to  support  a  wife. 

That  was  six  or  seven  years  ago.  Yes- 
terday in  this  trade  paper  I  found  a  full- 


A  Hoary-Headed  Falsehood      101 

length  picture  of  him,  seated  in  his 
mahogany-trimmed  office.  He  has  been 
made  his  company's  president. 

We  need  to  get  two  things  firmly  in 
mind  about  American  business. 

First :  In  a  country  growing  as  fast  as 
this,  the  earning  power  of  money  is  very 
great.  Your  banker  will  point  out  to  you 
that  if,  at  twenty-one,  you  begin  saving 
money  regularly,  systematically,  you  will 
at  fifty  have  as  large  an  income  from  your 
savings  as  you  now  have  from  your  salary. 

In  other  words,  any  man  in  America 
who  will  set  himself  doggedly  at  it  can 
acquire  a  competence. 

And  second:  Business  in  America  is 
expanding  so  fast  that  any  man  who  will 
take  the  trouble  to  equip  himself,  and  who 
will  work  determinedly,  can  win  a  fair 
measure  of  success. 

Luck?  you  ask.     Yes. 

"  I  believe  there  are  lucky  men,"  said 
Charles  M.  Schwab.  "  I  have  made  it  a 
rule  of  my  life  to  surround  myself  with 
lucky  men :  to  have  no  other  kind  in  posi- 
tions of  importance  that  I  control." 


IO2          More  Power  to  You 

But  when  you  come  to  ask  Charles  M. 
Schwab  what  he  means  by  luck,  you  will 
discover  from  his  own  career  that  he 
means,  first,  hard  work;  second,  an  un^ 
shakable  conviction  that  he  deserves  to  be 
lucky  and  is  going  to  be  lucky. 

Many  men  have  the  work  without  the 
conviction. 

Get  that  conviction  to-day. 

Get  it  firmly  implanted  in  your  mind 
that  in  this  country  a  majority  of  the  men 
your  age,  who  have  less  brains  than  you, 
are  going  to  be  successful  men  at  fifty. 

If  you  believe  that  you  are  going  to  be 
one  of  that  majority,  if  you  save  money 
and  work,  you  will  win. 

Don't  tell  me  that  you  won't 

I  have  never  met  you ;  but  I  have  met  a 
good  many  self-made  rich  men.  And, 
without  knowing  you  at  all,  I  tell  you  con- 
fidently that  you  have  more  brains  than 
some  of  them  have. 


XXV 

IN   APPRECIATION   OF   MOTHERS 

A  LADY  asks  me  whether  I  am  in  favor 
of  woman  suffrage. 

My  answer  is  that  I  am  in  favor  of 
mothers. 

Having  been  a  voter  for  a  number  of 
years,  and  something  of  a  student  of  poli- 
tics, I  am  under  no  illusions  about  the 
ballot. 

It  is  a  very  clumsy  weapon.  Politics 
accomplishes  a  minimum  of  progress  with 
a  maximum  of  expense  and  noise.  There 
are  many  other  avenues  of  influence  more 
quiet,  more  pleasant,  and  far  more 
effective. 

But  if  the  mothers  of  America  believe 
that  the  ballot  will  help  them  to  widen 
their  influence;  if  suffrage  will  extend  the 
atmosphere  of  the  home  into  politics  in- 
stead of  extending  the  atmosphere  of  poli- 
103 


104          More  Power  to  You 

tics  into  the  home;  if  the  ballot  will  help 
women  to  make  the  working  conditions  of 
girls  better,  enable  them  to  lead  happier, 
bigger  lives,  and  found  finer  homes  — 
then  I  am  for  suffrage  now  and  forever. 

It  is  an  interesting  thing  to  remember 
that  the  whole  process  of  evolution  has 
been  devoted  to  one  single  accomplishment 
—  the  development  of  a  mother. 

Nature  began  with  the  protozoa,  the 
simplest  form  of  life :  then  she  made  the 
worms:  then  the  mollusks:  then  the  am- 
phibia: then  the  reptiles:  then  the  birds: 
and  last  of  all,  what? 

The  mammalia,  as  science  calls  them  — •- 
the  mothers. 

Having  made  the  mothers,  Nature  has 
never  made  anything  since.  She  consid- 
ered her  task  complete. 

All  up  through  the  various  stages  of 
life  she  had  struggled  gradually  toward 
motherhood. 

In  the  lower  stages  there  is  no  mother- 
hood, because  there  is  no  infancy.  With 
the  ephemeridae  the  moment  of  birth  is 
also  the  moment  of  death:  they  are  born, 


In  Appreciation  of  Mothers      105 

live,  and  die  all  in  a  single  instant.  Not 
much  chance  for  motherhood  there. 

The  land-crab  marches  down  from  her 
mountain  home  to  the  seashore  once  a 
year,  lays  her  eggs  in  the  sand,  and 
marches  up  again.  (There  are  Femin- 
ists, by  the  way,  who  contend  that  the  land- 
crab  has  the  right  idea  —  that  mother- 
hood ought  to  be  only  an  incident  in  the 
woman's  life,  as  it  is  in  the  land-crab's 
life.) 

Even  with  the  higher  animals  the  young 
are  dependent  on  the  mother  for  only  a 
few  days  or  weeks  or  months.  They 
come  quickly  to  self-reliance:  they  are 
ready  almost  immediately  to  feed  them- 
selves. 

For  man  alone  Nature  reserved  infancy. 
And  infancy  created  motherhood. 

For  years  the  child  is  dependent  upon  its 
mother  absolutely.  It  is  weak,  helpless, 
unable  to  feed  itself,  unable  to  walk,  an 
easy  victim  to  a  single  hour's  neglect. 

Out  of  its  helplessness,  unselfishness 
was  born  into  woman's  heart;  out  of  its 
pain  grew  sympathy;  out  of  its  long  years 


106          More  Power  to  You 

of  weakness  came  patience  and  self-sacri- 
ficing devotion. 

Women,  bending  over  the  cradles  of 
their  young,  learned  these  virtues  first: 
little  by  little,  they  have  passed  them  on  to 
men.  And  the  world's  progress  is  meas- 
ured by  the  slow  record  of  their  growth 
in  the  world  —  the  growth  of  a  patience 
and  unselfishness  and  devotion  and  love. 

Unless  each  new  generation  of  women 
gathered  these  golden  virtues  all  over 
again  at  the  cradles  of  their  young,  the 
world  would  soon  forget. 

The  weakness  of  infancy  is  the  source 
of  all  social  progress.  "  Of  such  is  the 
kingdom  of  heaven. " 

We  men  in  business  get  to  thinking  of 
ourselves  as  important  in  the  scheme  of 
things:  but  we  are  not.  Harriman  dies, 
and  the  trains  on  his  railroads  stop  for  five 
minutes  and  then  rush  on  again.  We  men 
can  be  killed  by  millions,  and  the  ranks 
close  up  and  move  forward.  The  world 
can  not  be  permanently  damaged,  so  long 
as  it  has  its  mothers. 

"  What  does  France  need  most?  "  they 


In  Appreciation  of  Mothers      107 

asked  Napoleon.  "  Mothers,''  was  his 
reply. 

"  All  that  I  am  I  owe  to  my  mother," 
Lincoln  said  a  hundred  times. 

And  what  was  true  of  Lincoln  is  true  in 
large  degree  of  every  other  good  man  in 
the  world. 

Fortunate  are  those  men  who  know  it. 


XXVI 

THE    LESSON   OF   A   FAILURE 

DO  you  want  to  do  some  reading  that 
will  be  intensely  interesting  as  well 
as  profitable?  Read  the  story  of  some 
of  the  great  failures  of  the  world.  Find 
out  what  caused  them. 

I  have  recently  been  reading  the  story 
of  a  colossal  failure  —  the  defeat  of  the 
Spanish  Armada,  as  told  by  the  historian 
Froude. 

The  Armada  was  the  greatest  fleet  the 
medieval  world  had  ever  seen.  It  con- 
sisted of  130  ships,  and  carried  more  than 
30,000  sailors  and  soldiers. 

It  was  fitted  out  by  Philip  II  of  Spain 
to  conquer  England,  and  was  meant  to 
overwhelm  all  resistance  by  its  size.  It 
mounted  more  than  2,500  guns. 

Yet  this  magnificent  fleet,  the  mightiest 
in  the  world,  was  met  by  a  little  fleet  un- 
108 


The  Lesson  of  a  Failure       109 

der  Lord  Howard  and  decisively  defeated. 

Why? 

Because  the  Spanish  were  not  so  brave 
as  the  English?  No.  Because  their  guns 
were  inferior?  Not  at  all. 

The  Spanish  Armada  failed  because  its 
commander  had  no  faith  in  himself. 
Read  this  letter,  which  he  wrote  to  the 
King  when  he  was  notified  of  his  appoint- 
ment: 

My  health  is  bad  [he  wrote],  and  from  my 
small  experience  of  the  water  I  know  that  I  am 
always  seasick.  I  have  no  money  which  I  can 
spare.  [As  a  matter  of  fact,  he  was  the  richest 
nobleman  in  Spain.]  The  expedition  is  on  such 
a  scale  and  the  object  of  it  is  of  such  high  im- 
portance, that  the  person  at  the  head  of  it  ought 
to  understand  navigation  and  sea-fighting,  and 
I  know  nothing  of  either.  I  have  not  one  of 
these  essential  qualifications.  I  have  no  acquaint- 
ance among  the  officers  who  are  to  serve  under 
me.  Were  I  competent  otherwise,  I  should  have 
to  act  in  the  dark  by  the  opinion  of  others,  and 
I  can  not  tell  to  whom  I  may  trust.  The 
Adelantado  of  Castile  would  do  better  than  I. 
Our  Lord  would  help  him,  for  he  is  a  good 


no          More  Power  to  You 

Christian  and  has  fought  in  naval  battles.  If 
you  send  me,  depend  upon  it,  I  shall  have  a  bad 
account  to  render  of  my  trust. 

Think  of  Philip  II  appointing  a  man  to 
command  his  fleet  who  would  write  a  let- 
ter like  that! 

How  could  such  a  commander  expect 
30,000  men  to  have  any  faith  in  him,  when 
he  had  absolutely  none  in  himself? 

Yet  the  headstrong  King  did  send  him; 
and  the  result  was  one  of  the  most  monu- 
mental disasters  of  history. 

Men  fail  for  many  reasons. 

Some  because  they  overreach  them- 
selves —  because  they  have  too  much  self- 
confidence. 

But  there  is  another  kind  of  failure  that 
is  far  worse  —  the  failure  of  those  who, 
as  Goethe  says,  "  make  no  mistakes,  be- 
cause they  never  wish  to  do  anything 
worth  doing." 

For  goodness'  sake,  make  mistakes. 

If  you  are  going  to  fail  at  all,  let  it  be 
because  you  believe  too  much  in  yourself. 

That,  at  least,  is  a  man's  way  to  fail. 


XXVII 

WHEN   A    BOY   KNOWS   MORE   THAN 
HIS    FATHER 

SOMETIMES  a  boy  does  know  more 
than  his  father. 

Ours  would  have  been  a  very  different 
history  if  Abe  Lincoln,  age  sixteen  or  so, 
had  been  guided  by  the  wisdom  of  Thomas 
Lincoln,  age  thirty-six  or  so. 

"  Now,  Abe,"  we  can  imagine  him  say- 
ing, "  don't  waste  time  readin'  them  books. 
Readin'  never  done  me  any  good,  and 
what  was  good  enough  for  me  's  good 
enough  for  you." 

Lincoln  knew  more  than  his  father.  It 
was  a  divine  disobedience  that  led  him  to 
close  his  ears  to  the  man  who  had  brought 
him  into  the-  world,  and  open  his  heart  to 
the  vision  that  was  to  help  him  conquer 
the  world. 

in 


112          More  Power  to  You 

Robert  Louis  Stevenson  knew  mora 
than  his  father. 

That  father  would  have  shackled  him  to 
engineering.  He  could  not  understand 
the  obstinacy  of  the  boy  who  refused  to 
apply  himself.  That  obstinacy  saved  a 
great  author  from  misery  as  a  mediocre 
engineer.  It  was  an  obstinacy  that  en- 
riched the  ages. 

Jesus  Christ  knew  more  than  His 
father. 

"  Thy  father  and  I  have  sought  thee 
sorrowing,"  said  His  mother  to  Him. 

And  neither  His  mother  nor  His  father 
could  hear  the  Voice  that  was  calling  Him 
away  from  them,  the  Voice  that  was  to 
find  fathers  and  mothers  and  brothers  and 
sisters  for  Him  among  all  those  who 
should  do  His  will. 

"  Let  no  man  despise  thy  youth,"  wrote 
Paul  to  Timothy. 

The  boy  who  has  not  some  firm  convic- 
tions and  a  willingness  to  defend  them, 
even  against  the  arguments  of  those  older 
tthan  himself,  is  not  likely  to  amount  to 
much,  either  as  a  boy  or  as  a  man. 


When  a  Boy  Knows  More      113 

But  they  must  be  convictions,  not  mere 
prejudices,  not  selfish  impulses  or  passions. 

I  know  two  men  who  "  knew  more  " 
than  their  fathers. 

One  boy  is  the  office  manager  of  a  large 
manufacturing  concern,  and  his  salary  is 
$40  a  week. 

"  Better  go  on  in  school,"  said  his 
father  to  him  when  he  was  seventeen 
years  old.  "  Better  go  to  college:  better 
get  all  the  education  you  can  while  you 
have  the  chance.  You  '11  need  it  after- 
wards." 

But  the  boy  quit  school  and  went  to 
work. 

He  was  promoted  from  office-boy  to 
bookkeeper,  from  bookkeeper  to  head 
bookkeeper,  from  head  bookkeeper  to 
office  manager. 

His  path  looked  golden  and  long.  And 
then  suddenly  he  stopped. 

4  You  see  that  man?"  said  the  presi- 
dent of  his  concern  to  me  the  other  day. 
'  There  is  a  man  who  might  have  become 
general  manager  of  this  business  if  he 
had  had  a  college  education.  His  salary 


114          More  Power  to  You 

might  have  been  $20,000  a  year:  instead 
it 's  $2,000.  He 's  reached  his  limit. 
What  a  shame  that  he  has  n't  education 
enough  to  go  on." 

He  "  knew  more "  than  his  father. 
And  his  boyish  obstinacy  is  costing  him 
$18,000  a  year. 

"  Keep  yourself  clean,  my  son,"  said 
the  father  of  another  boy.  "  You  '11 
never  regret  it.  And  some  day  you  '11 
thank  heaven  you  did." 

But  the  boy  knew  more  than  his  father. 
He  knew  that  every  young  man  who  is 
worth  his  salt  must  sow  his  wild  oats. 

So  he  sowed  right  merrily. 

I  saw  him  the  other  day.  He  came  to 
me  about  getting  a  job. 

He  was  pale,  and  anemic,  and  his  hands 
twitched,  and  he  was  forever  rolling 
cigarettes.  He  could  not  concentrate  his 
mind  on  one  subject  for  even  a  couple  of 
minutes. 

I  could  not  give  him  a  job:  no  man 
could.  God  knows  what  will  become  of 
him.  He  would  starve  if  it  were  not  for 
the  few  dollars  he  gets  from  his  father  — 


When  a  Boy  Knows  More      115 

The  father  who,  he  thought,  knew  ever 
so  much  less  than  he. 

YOUTH  is  the  mainspring  of  the  world. 

Its  insurgency,  its  inquisitiveness,  its 
eagerness  to  try  the  untried  and  do  the  im- 
possible, drives  the  world  forward  in 
spite  of  the  conservatism  of  age. 

Fortunate  are  those  of  us  who  recog- 
nize the  divine  importance  of  youth's  cock- 
sureness  and  conceit,  and  yet  know  how, 
gently  and  appreciatively,  to  temper  it 
with  the  riper  judgment  of  added  years. 


XXVIII 

BUILDING   MATERIALS    FOR    CASTLES   IN 
SPAIN    HAVE    NOT   ADVANCED   AT    ALL 

I  HAVE  been  reading  the  story  of  Cecil 
Rhodes. 

His  life  was  full  of  adventure :  it  makes 
excellent  reading. 

But  the  passage  that  interested  me  most 
was  this: 

Riding  to  the  Matoppos  one  day  at  the  usual 
four  miles  an  hour,  Rhodes  had  not  said  a  word 
for  two  hours,  when  he  suddenly  remarked: 
"  Well,  le  Sueur,  there  is  one  thing  I  hope  for 
you,  and  that  is  that  while  still  a  young  man  you 
may  never  have  everything  you  want. 

"  Take  myself,  for  instance :  I  am  not  an  old 
man,  and  yet  there  is  nothing  I  want.  I  have 
been  Prime  Minister  of  the  Cape,  there  is  De 
Beers  [the  diamond  mines  that  Rhodes  con- 
trolled] and  the  railways,  and  there  is  a  big  coun- 
try called  after  me,  and  I  have  more  money  than 
I  can  spend. 

116 


Castles  in  Spain  117 

"You  might  ask,  'Wouldn't  you  like  to  be 
Prime  Minister  again  ? '  Well,  I  answer  you 
very  fairly  —  I  should  take  it  if  it  were  offered 
to  me,  but  I  certainly  don't  crave  for  it." 

At  twenty-five  he  was  so  rich  that  he 
did  not  want  for  any  of  the  things  that 
money  can  buy;  at  thirty-five  he  did  not 
want  anything  at  all;  at  forty-nine  he 
died. 

I  hope  I  may  never  be  guilty  of  writing 
anything  intended  to  make  poor  people 
contented  with  their  lot. 

I  would  rather  be  known  as  one  who 
sought  to  inspire  his  readers  with  a  divine 
discontent. 

To  make  men  and  women  discontented 
with  bad  health,  and  to  show  them  how, 
by  hard  work,  they  can  have  better 
health. 

To  make  them  discontented  with  their 
intelligence,  and  to  stimulate  them  to  con- 
tinued study. 

To  urge  them  on  to  better  jobs,  better 
homes,  more  money  in  the  bank. 

But  it  does  no  harm,   in  our  striving 


n8          More  Power  to  You 

after  these  worth-while  things,  to  pause 
once  in  a  while  and  count  our  blessings. 

Prominent  among  my  blessings  I  count 
the  joys  of  anticipation  —  the  delights  of 
erecting  Castles  in  Spain. 

"  There  would  be  few  enterprises  of 
great  labor  or  hazard  undertaken/'  says 
Dr.  Johnson,  "  if  we  did  not  have  the 
power  of  magnifying  the  advantages 
which  we  persuade  ourselves  to  expect 
from  them." 

Divine  power!  Blessed  gift  of  the 
gods !  How  largely  are  they  to  be  pitied 
who  have  it  not. 

Aladdin  did  not  have  it.  Nero  did  not 
have  it.  Anything  he  wanted  he  could 
have  at  the  instant  when  he  wanted  it. 
And,  far  from  finding  joy  in  life,  he 
found  insanity  and  the  detestation  of 
mankind. 

If  you  would  discover  the  really  happy 
men  of  history,  look  for  those  who  have 
striven  forward  from  one  achievement  to 
another,  drawn  by  the  power  of  their  own 
anticipations. 

They   have    made    every   day   yield    a 


Castles  in  Spain  119 

double  pleasure  —  the  joy  of  the  present, 
and  the  different  but  no  less  satisfying  joys 
provided  by  a  wise  imagination. 

I  believe  in  day-dreams.  I  am  strong 
for  Castles  in  Spain.  I  have  a  whole 
group  of  them  myself,  and  am  constantly 
building  improvements  and  making  altera- 
tions. 

I  do  not  let  my  work  upon  them  inter- 
fere with  my  regular  job.  Rather,  it  re- 
inforces the  job.  My  castles  are  an 
incentive  to  efficiency:  they  give  added 
reason  and  purpose  to  the  business  of 
being  alive. 

I  trust  that  before  I  am  ready  to  stop 
I  may  have  considerably  more  money  than 
I  now  have. 

But  I  trust  also  that  I  may  never  have 
too  much  money.  I  should  not,  for  in- 
stance, like  to  have  as  much  as  Mr.  Rocke- 
feller. 

Indeed,  I  feel  an  almost  snobbish  sense 
of  superiority  when  I  think  of  Mr.  Rocke- 
feller and  Cecil  Rhodes  and  Croesus  and 
all  the  others  of  that  ilk. 

For  I  have  everything  that  they  have  — 


I2O          More  Power  to  You 

a  roof  over  my  head,  and  three  meals  a 
day,  and  work  that  I  like,  and  the  love  of 
good  friends. 

And  I  have  something  else  that  they  do 
not  have  and  can  not  know. 

I  have  wants. 


XXIX 

TOO   MANY   MEN    STILL   BELIEVE    IN 
PERPETUAL   MOTION 

SOME  day,  go  into  the  Patent  Office  in 
Washington  and  look  at  the  applica- 
tions that  have  been  made  for  patents  on 
perpetual-motion  machines. 

You  will  see  some  very  ingenious  de- 
vices. 

For  instance,  a  machine  to  be  run  by 
the  power  of  gravity  —  iron  balls  drop- 
ping down  a  chute  and  turning  a  wheel. 

The  inventor  of  that  machine  provided 
for  everything.  He  even  added  a  brake 
to  stop  the  machine,  in  case  it  should  run 
so  fast  as  to  become  unmanageable. 

He  forgot  only  one  thing  —  that  it  re- 
quires just  as  much  energy  to  lift  the  balls 
up  against  gravity  as  they  develop  by  fall- 
ing down. 

121 


122          More  Power  to  You 

In  England,  between  1617  and  1903, 
more  than  six  hundred  separate  applica- 
tions for  patents  were  made  on  perpetual- 
motion  machines. 

Every  single  year  brings  its  inevitable 
crop  of  new  applications. 

They  stand  —  this  unending  procession 
—  as  a  magnificent  monument  to  the 
unchangeableness  of  human  nature. 

A  testimony  to  man's  unquenchable  be- 
lief  that  somehow,  somewhere,  it  is  pos- 
sible in  this  world  to  get  something  for 
nothing. 

It  is  a  mistake  to  gather  all  these  per- 
petual-motion machines  together  in  Wash- 
ington, D.  C. 

One  of  them  should  be  set  up  at  the 
busiest  .corner  of  every  American  city. 
And  twelve  should  be  distributed  along 
Wall  Street,  New  York. 

Every  man  who  goes  downtown  to  busi- 
ness in  the  morning  should  pass  a  per- 
petual-motion machine  and  be  reminded 
of  its  lesson. 

There  is  one  great  law  that  runs 
through  all  life.  Many  men  have  discov- 


Perpetual  Motion  123 

ered  it:  Emerson  named  it  the  Law  of 
Compensation. 

Everywhere  that  law  is  operative.  In 
physics,  action  and  reaction  are  equal. 
In  electricity,  if  the  north  end  of  a  magnet 
attracts,  the  south  end  repels. 

If,  as  Emerson  points  out,  a  govern- 
ment is  bad,  the  governor's  life  becomes 
unsafe.  If  taxes  are  too  high,  they  yield 
no  revenue;  if  laws  are  too  severe,  juries 
will  not  convict;  if  they  are  too  lenient, 
private  vengeance  steps  in  and  metes  out 
justice. 

Compensation  —  everywhere. 

When  I  started  in  business  I  used  to  be 
somewhat  worried  by  the  good  fortune 
of  the  wicked.  I  saw  men  who  worked 
one  half  as  hard  as  I  and  were  paid  twice 
as  much  money. 

I  saw  other  men  lift  themselves  into 
the  good  graces  of  the  boss  on  the  golden 
wings  of  golf  and  funny  stories. 

But  I  have  seen  the  Law  of  Compensa- 
tion get  in  too  much  deadly  work  ever  to 
concern  myself  any  more  about  anybody 
else's  success. 


124          More  Power  to  You 

I  have  seen  good  fellows  who  thought 
they  were  perfectly  secure  because  they 
called  the  boss  by  his  first  name,  be  fired 
by  the  same  boss,  who  called  them  by  their 
first  name  when  he  did  it. 

And  I  have  seen  men  grow  very  rich  — 
and  I  know  that  there  are  many  ways  in 
which  the  Law  of  Compensation  can  work 
when  a  man  has  the  ambition  to  become 
very  rich. 

It  can  make  him  pay  in  health.  It  can 
turn  his  home  into  a  counting-room.  It 
can  make  his  children  snobs  and  hypo- 
crites. It  can  destroy  his  joy  in  simple 
things. 

Another  gentleman  discovered  the  Law 
of  Compensation  even  before  Emerson. 
He  stated  it  in  this  form : 

Be  not  deceived;  God  is  not  mocked:  for 
whatsoever  a  man  soweth,  that  shall  he 
also  reap. 

There  are  many  seeming  exceptions  to 
this  law;  but  the  longer  I  live  the  more 
sure  I  am  that  if  most  of  the  exceptions 
were  analyzed  they  would  be  found  not  to 
be  exceptions  at  all. 


Perpetual  Motion  125 

There  is  no  such  thing  as  perpetual  mo- 
tion. No  man  ever  for  very  long  gets 
more  than  he  deserves,  without  paying  for 
it  something  equally  as  valuable  as  he  gets. 

"  Nothing  can  work  me  damage  except 
myself,"  said  St.  Bernard.  "  The  harm 
that  I  sustain  I  carry  about  in  me,  and 
never  am  a  real  sufferer  except  by  my  own 
fault" 

"  And  " —  he  might  have  added  — 
"  never  a  real  gainer  for  very  long,  except 
by  my  own  hard  work." 


XXX 

YOUR   OWN   LITTLE   BED   IS   YOUR 
BEST   M.    D. 

ONE  reason  for  many  of  the  world's 
tribulations  is  simply  lack  of  sleep. 

Men  who  ought  to  be  firm-nerved  and 
resolute  are  vacillating  and  irritable,  ready 
to  believe  the  worst  about  one  another, 
quick  to  take  offense. 

Troubles  that  would  be  laughed  away 
by  rested  men  are  bungled  into  bigness 
by  sluggish  brains. 

The  world  is  too  much  ruled  by  tired- 
eyed  men. 

Look  at  the  newspaper  pictures  of  Mr. 
Asquith  if  you  would  know  why  England 
did  not  make  more  progress  in  the  first 
year  of  the  war.  His  face  looks  as  if  he 
were  7,000  hours  behind  in  his  sleep. 

Study  any  one  of  the  flash-lights  taken 
of  our  prominent  men  at  public  banquets. 
126 


Your  Best  M.  D.  127 

It    will    help    you    to    understand    why 
our  own  government  is  not  more  efficient. 

To  avoid  overeating  and  alcohol  and  the  ciga- 
rette habit  are  matters  of  self-control  [says  Dr. 
Richard  Cabot  in  the  American  Magazine].  To 
get  the  sleep  one  needs  (which  means  all  that  one 
can  possibly  soak  into  one's  system  in  twenty-four 
hours)  often  takes  courage  —  the  courage  to  re- 
fuse invitations,  to  invite  ridicule,  to  seem  odd  or 
"  puritanic."  I  believe  that  more  minor  illnesses 
are  due  to  lack  of  sleep  than  to  any  other  recog- 
nizable factor.  A  person  catches  cold,  gets  lum- 
bago, is  constipated  or  headache-ridden  because 
his  vitality  is  below  par,  his  physical  expenditure 
beyond  his  physical  income.  Sleep  would  set  him 
square  with  the  world;  but  to  get  sleep  means 
sacrificing  the  evening's  fun.  This  he  won't  do, 
and  so  he  runs  in  debt,  and  is  chronically  edging 
toward  a  breakdown. 

A  few  men  seem  to  be  able  to  operate 
indefinitely  with  very  little  sleep.  Edison 
is  one  of  these.  Napoleon  seemed  to  be. 

But  Napoleon  in  his  later  years  showed 
plainly  a  loss  of  virility  due  to  accumu- 
lated fatigue.  He  often  dropped  asleep 
in  the  midst  of  vital  matters. 


ia8          More  Power  to  You 

Gladstone,  on  the  other  hand,  consid- 
ered regular  sleep  of  first  importance,  and 
sacrificed  everything  to  it. 

When  Perseus,  the  last  king  of  ancient 
Macedonia,  was  confined  as  a  prisoner  at 
Rome,  his  guards  wished  to  put  him  out 
of  the  way  without  leaving  any  marks  on 
his  person  or  bringing  down  the  dis- 
pleasure of  their  superiors  upon  them. 

They  accomplished  their  purpose  by 
making  it  impossible  for  the  poor  prisoner 
to  get  a  single  moment's  sleep. 

Napoleon  sent  30,000  of  his  trained 
veterans  to  Haiti  at  one  time  to  reduce 
the  negro  population,  who  were  being  led 
by  the  redoubtable  Toussaint  L'Ouverture. 
A  few  months  later  5,000  of  them  —  all 
that  were  left  —  withdrew,  bedraggled 
and  defeated. 

What  had  happened  to  the  other 
25,000?  Shot?  Not  many  of  them. 
Toussaint  did  not  have  ammunition  enough 
to  shoot  very  many. 

No.  He  adopted  the  simpler  and  more 
effective  plan  of  starving  them  to  death 
for  lack  of  sleep.  Night  after  night, 


Your  Best  M.  D.  129 

when  the  French  lay  down  to  snatch  a  few 
moments'  rest,  he  would  threaten  an  at- 
tack. All  night  long  a  few  of  his  men 
would  continue  the  pretense  —  and  all 
night  long  the  French  would  toss  in  sleep- 
lessness. 

They  had  faced  the  best  men  of  Europe 
and  won:  but  they  could  not  conquer  the 
loss  of  sleep. 

I  have  seen  an  abject  coward  lie  down 
to  sleep,  and  rise  up  a  strong,  courageous 
man.  I  have  seen  a  liar  go  to  bed,  and 
awake  ready  to  tell  the  truth  and  take  the 
consequences.  I  have  seen  vigorous,  de- 
termined executives  step  out  of  the  same 
beds  where  faltering  ineffectives  lay  down 
the  night  before. 

'  Those  who  are  habituated  to  full  and 
regular  sleep  are  those  who  recover  most 
readily  from  sickness,"  says  Dr.  Benjamin 
W.  Richardson,  and  adds:  "  The  obser- 
vation of  this  truth  led  Menander  to  teach 
that  sleep  is  the  natural  cure  of  all 
diseases." 

Menander  was  right.  We  should  have 
fewer  doctor  bills;  fewer  deaths  of  men 


130          More  Power  to  You 

between  forty  and  fifty;  fewer  quarrels  — 
yes,  even  fewer  wars  • —  if  the  nerves  of 
all  men  were  kept  toned  and  sweet  by  a 
generous  measure  of  sleep. 

In  all  the  world  of  literature  there  is 
no  finer  line  than  this  : 

He  giveth  His  beloved  sleep. 


XXXI 

THERE  IS  A  GREAT  DEAL  OF  ENCOURAGE- 
MENT  IN    HISTORY    FOR   MOST   OF    US 

A  MOTHER  writes  me  a  very  dis- 
couraged letter.  Her  boy  is  good 
and  hard-working,  but  he  is  very  backward 
in  school. 

In  fact,  his  teachers  have  about  given 
him  up  in  despair. 

Both  the  boy's  father  and  his  mother 
stood  well  in  their  classes:  they  are  fond 
of  books  and  study.  They  can  not  un- 
derstand what  is  the  matter  with  their  boy. 

Fortunately,  there  are  two  very  en- 
couraging things  that  can  be  said  in  reply 
to  a  letter  like  this. 

One  of  them  I  have  just  been  reading  in 
a  Life  of  Kitchener  by  Harold  Begbie: 

Nothing  in  Herbert  Kitchener  created  passion- 
ate friendships  or  stirred  the  admiration  of 


132          More  Power  to  You 

smaller  men  among  the  cadets.  He  was  remark- 
able for  quickness  in  mathematics,  but  in  every- 
thing else  was  accounted  thick-headed  —  a  slow 
coach,  climbing  the  dull  hill  of  duty,  which  has 
no  dazzle  of  adventure  on  the  crest. 

He  managed  to  scramble  into  Woolwich:  he 
was  not  high  on  the  lists;  and  no  one  thought 
anything  about  him.  After  leaving  Woolwich 
he  got  his  commission  in  the  Royal  Engineers; 
and  still  no  one  thought  much  about  him. 

The  boy  who  was  dull  and  thick-headed 
—  whom  nobody  thought  much  about  — 
grew  up  to  become  the  idol  of  an  empire. 

Cardinal  Wiseman,  as  a  boy,  was  termed 
"  dull  and  stupid." 

Charles  Darwin,  who  changed  the  whole 
channel  of  thought  in  the  scientific  world, 
was  so  lazy  and  do-less  in  boyhood  that 
his  father  predicted  he  would  be  a  disgrace 
to  the  family. 

Heine,  by  his  own  confession,  "  idled 
away  his  school  days  and  was  horribly 
bored  "  by  the  instruction  given  him. 

Wordsworth  was  so  lazy  up  to  the  age 
of  seventeen  as  to  be  "  incapable  of  con- 
tinued application  to  prescribed  work." 


Encouragement  in  History     133 

Henry  Ward  Beecher  barely  succeeded 
in  graduating  from  Amherst,  having  stood 
almost  at  the  foot  of  his  class;  and  James 
Russell  Lowell  was  suspended  by  Harvard 
"  on  account  of  continued  neglect  of  his 
college  duties." 

First  of  all,  to  this  mother  of  a  "  back- 
ward "  boy  I  would  say:  Have  courage. 
He  travels  in  good  company.  Hundreds 
of  those  of  whom  the  world  is  most  proud 
have  been  almost  given  up  in  despair  by 
their  parents  in  youth. 

Only  when  the  spark  of  their  special  in- 
terest was  struck  have  they  shown  the  stuff 
that  was  in  them. 

And  the  second  thing  that  may  be  said 
to  such  a  mother  is  even  more  encourag- 
ing. 

Dullness  is  the  rule  in  the  world:  bril- 
liance is  the  exception. 

Business  and  government  and  law  and 
medicine  and  the  church  are  ruled  by 
mediocrities. 

"  I  have  talked  with  great  men,"  said 
Lincoln,  "  and  I  do  not  see  how  they  dif- 
fer from  others." 


134          More  Power  to  You 

The  truest  bit  of  business  philosophy 
ever  penned  is  contained  in  the  story  of 
the  tortoise  and  the  hare. 

Any  one  who  watches  business  life  care- 
fully for  any  length  of  time  is  continually 
seeing  brilliant,  unstable  men  overtaken 
and  surpassed  by  men  with  half  their  in- 
herent ability,  whose  very  mental  slowness 
has  inculcated  in  them  a  mastering  persist- 
ency. 

The  mother  of  the  boy  who  invariably 
leads  his  class  has  reason  to  be  concerned: 
the  mother  of  the  dull  boy  might  wish  him 
more  cleverly  endowed,  but  she  need  not 
despair  if  only  his  slowness  to  learn  fos- 
ters thoroughness. 

"  My  master  whipped  me  very  hard/' 
says  Dr.  Johnson.  "  Without  that,  sir,  I 
would  have  done  nothing." 

Yet  he  who  as  a  boy  had  to  be  whipped 
to  learn,  set  himself  in  later  life  doggedly  ' 
and  unrelentingly  to  a  task  that  raised  him 
high  above  the  brilliant  men  of  his  time  in 
literary  prominence,  and  made  him  a 
citizen  of  the  ages. 


XXXII 

YOU   SHOULD   NOT  WORRY 

HARRIMAN  died  twenty  years  be- 
fore his  time.     He  was  a  tremen- 
dous worker,  but  work  did  not  kill  him. 

What  killed  Harriman  was  thinking  in 
bed. 

Thinking  in  business  hours  is  a  construc- 
tive process.  Thinking  in  bed  is  usually 
worry. 

One  reason  why  every  man  should  read 
history  is  in  order  that  he  may  know  the 
folly  of  worry. 

Read  the  History  of  Rome  by  Ferrero, 
especially  those  chapters  following  the  as- 
sassination of  Caesar.  See  the  pitiful 
worry  of  poor  Cicero. 

Should  he  follow  the  dictates  of  his 
conscience  and  throw  in  his  lot  with  the 
friends  of  Caesar,  who  had  shown  him  so 
much  kindness? 

135 


136          More  Power  to  You 

Or  should  he  take  what  seemed  to  be 
the  safer  course,  and  join  with  Caesar's 
assassins? 

Day  after  day  he  tortured  his  soul  with 
worry. 

How  pitifully  unimportant  all  that 
worry  seems  to  us,  two  thousand  years 
afterward.  How  clearly  we  can  see  that 
if  Cicero  had  simply  followed  his  con- 
science he  could  have  spared  himself  all 
that  worry  and  probably  saved  both  his 
life  and  his  honor. 

A  greater  man  than  Cicero  lived 
through  a  far  greater  period  of  trial. 
And  he  did  not  worry. 

That  man  was  Abraham  Lincoln. 

He  was  depressed,  yes;  heartsick,  yes. 
But  worried?  No! 

When  he  was  tempted  to  worry  by  some 
trial  that  seemed  overwhelming,  he  would 
say  to  himself,  "  This  too  will  pass." 

By  which  he  meant  that  a  thousand  such 
trials  had  visited  men  in  centuries  gone 
by,  and  had  passed  away.  His  trial  was 
important  enough  to  make  him  think. 


You  Should  Not  Worry       137 

But  no  trial  could  be  important  enough  to 
make  him  worry. 

A  certain  business  man  faced  his  board 
of  directors  recently.  He  had  done  his 
best  —  but  he  had  lost  them  a  large  sum 
of  money. 

One  of  the  directors  said  to  him: 
'  You  don't  seem  to  be  much  worried." 

He  replied: 

"  You  gentlemen  don't  pay  me  any 
money  to  worry  about  your  business.  You 
pay  me  to  do  my  best  according  to  my 
judgment  and  conscience.  I  have  done 
that.  To  worry  would  not  add  one  penny 
to  your  balance  sheet." 

Learn  this  lesson  from  history:  In  all 
the  six  thousand  years  of  history,  worry 
has  accomplished  nothing. 

Your  worry  will  accomplish  no  moree 


XXXIII 

THOUGHTS   ON   LYING  ON   MY   BACK 
AND   READING  A   SEED   CATALOGUE 

IT  is  snowing  outside;  the  sky  is  leaden; 
no  birds  sing. 

The  winter  wind  howls. 

And  I  have  been  lying  on  my  back,  read- 
ing a  seed  catalogue,  and  laughing  to  my- 
self at  poor  old  winter. 

He  is  my  hereditary  enemy.  The  Eng- 
lish have  not  watched  the  reports  of  Ger- 
many's condition  more  intently  than  I  have 
marked  the  various  stages  of  his. 

They  are  hoping  that  Germany  will  give 
in  before  next  autumn.  I  do  not  have  to 
hope.  I  know  positively  that  I  have  win- 
ter beaten.  I  have  even  marked  down  on 
my  calendar  the  date  in  April  when  I  shall 
celebrate  my  victory  by  my  annual  tri- 
umphal march. 

When  that  date  arrives,  I  pack  my  old 
138 


On  Reading  a  Seed  Catalogue      139 

corduroy  trousers  in  a  suit-case,  with  the 
two  shirts  I  bought  from  the  United  States 
Army  store  for  sixty-five  cents  each,  my 
old  curved  pipe  and  a  can  of  the  mixture 
that  my  wife  lets  me  use  outdoors  but  not 
inside  the  house,  and  set  forth  for  my  lit- 
tle farm  in  Massachusetts. 

People  wonder  why  I  have  a  farm  in  the 
rockiest  spot  in  the  world,  when  I  might 
have  selected  one  of  the  fertile  counties 
of  Massachusetts  or  Connecticut  or  New 
York. 

The  trouble  with  these  fertile  farms  is 
that  they  constantly  tempt  one  to  grow 
something  useful.  One  feels  conscience- 
stricken  not  to  be  trying  to  make  the  place 
pay. 

I  know  that  my  place  can  not  possibly 
pay.  I  know  that  nothing  will  grow  on 
it  but  pine  trees  and  flowers.  I  can  plant 
all  the  vacant  places  to  posies  without  one 
single  twinge  of  conscience.  I  have  a 
magnificent  alibi  for  my  inherent  laziness. 
Why  work,  I  say  to  myself,  when  it 's  no 
use?  Why  try  to  fight  against  Nature? 
Why  fly  in  the  face  of  Providence? 


140          More  Power  to  You 

Yet  a  little  sleep,  a  little  slumber, 
A  little  folding  of  the  hands  to  sleep. 

Slumber  and  flowers  —  what  more  can 
one  ask  of  a  farm? 

It  is  hard  for  me  to  understand  people 
who  have  even  one  foot  of  land  and  who 
do  not  raise  any  flowers. 

Just  as  a  back  yard  full  of  rubbish  al- 
ways seems  to  me  to  suggest  a  rubbishy 
soul,  and  a  barren  back  yard  a  more  or 
less  desolate  character,  so  a  back  yard  run- 
ning over  with  flowers  cries  out  that  in 
this  house  dwell  beauty  and  peace  and 
content. 

For  myself,  I  have  already  planned  out 
just  where  the  pansies  are  to  be  this  sum- 
mer, and  the  hollyhocks,  and  the  sweet- 
williams,  and  the  nasturtiums,  and  the 
roses. 

I  get  right  out  after  breakfast,  and  by 
nine  o'clock  the  sweat  is  pouring  down 
every  degree  of  my  longitude.  I  rejoice. 
I  say  to  my  soul,  "  Surely,  soul,  every  drop 
of  this  sweat  that  rolls  out  of  your  system 
lengthens  your  life."  I  feel  my  neck  get- 


On  Reading  a  Seed  Catalogue      141 

ting  sunburned,  and  I  do  not  care.  It  is 
as  if  health  were  being  poured  into  me 
from  the  great  source  of  all  health,  as 
power  is  poured  into  a  storage  battery. 

And  Sundays,  after  church,  I  take  a 
book  and  lie  down  in  the  midst  of  my  flow- 
ers, and  look  at  the  marvel  of  their  color- 
ing, and  wonder  how  it  is  that  out  of  the 
little  black  seeds  I  planted  could  have  come 
such  yellows  and  reds  and  purples  and 
greens. 

And  people  go  by  and  see  me  stretched 
there,  and  I  hear  them  tell  each  other  that 
I  am  a  fellow  from  New  York  who  is  sort 
of  crazy,  and  who  must  have  married  a 
rich  wife,  as  he  never  does  any  work. 

And  then  I  turn  over  and  listen  to  the 
much  more  satisfying  conversation  of  the 
flowers,  who  bend  their  heads  and  whis- 
per in  my  ear : 

Consider  the  lilies  of  the  field,  how  they  grow; 
they  toil  not,  neither  do  they  spin:  And  yet 
I  say  unto  you,  That  even  Solomon  in  all  his 
glory  was  not  arrayed  like  one  of  these.  Where- 
fore, if  God  so  clothe  the  grass  of  the  field,  which 
to-day  is,  and  to-morrow  is  cast  into  the  oven, 


142          More  Power  to  You 

shall  he  not  much  more  clothe  you,  O  ye  of  little 
faith?  .  .  .  Take  therefore  no  thought  for  the 
morrow:  for  the  morrow  shall  take  thought  for 
the  things  of  itself.  Sufficient  unto  the  day  is 
the  evil  thereof. 


XXXIV 

ON   TAKING   MY   OLD    FISHING-POLE 
OUT    OF    WINTER    STORAGE 

I  HAVE  examined  the  high  cost  of  liv- 
ing cloud  inside  and  out,  and  I  have 
been  able  to  discover  only  this  one  single 
patch  of  silver  lining: 

Meat  prices  are  so  high  that  the  fish 
which  I  shall  catch  this  summer  will  have 
some  chance  of  being  treated  by  my  family 
with  respect. 

No  more  shall  I  be  met  at  the  door  with 
the  cruel  taunt:  "If  you  expect  to  eat 
those  little  things,  you  will  have  to  clean 
them  yourself."  Instead  I  shall  be  hailed 
as  one  who,  in  his  slender  way,  is  aiding 
the  Allies,  and  fighting  for  liberty,  by  help- 
ing to  feed  the  world. 

Slinking  in  at  the  back  gate  with  my 
string  of  fish  is  a  humiliation  that  I  shall 
never  have  to  endure  again.  I  shall  march 
H3 


144          More  Power  to  You 

home  proudly,  as  the  cave-man  used  to 
march,  bearing  the  fruits  of  his  prowess 
to  his  woman  and  cubs. 

I  am  told  by  eminent  doctors  that  since 
1900  there  has  been  a  frightful  increase 
in  the  percentage  of  deaths  among  middle- 
aged  men  from  diseases  of  the  heart  and 
liver  and  kidneys. 

In  the  same  years  I  have  noted  a  fright- 
ful increase  in  golf  and  other  forms  of 
violent  outdoor  exercise. 

I  see  men  of  forty  and  even  younger 
rushing  off  to  the  links  for  a  game  that 
used  to  be  thought  safe  only  for  hardened 
survivors  of  ninety  or  more. 

I  watch  them  hurl  themselves  feverishly 
from  hole  to  hole,  returning  exhausted  to 
their  club-houses  or  being  driven  home  in 
limousines,  supposing  they  have  done  them- 
selves good. 

And  I  shake  my  head  sadly  and  fondle 
my  fishing-pole. 

No  man  ever  died  at  forty-five  from 
over-exertion  at  fishing.  There  is  not  a 
single  recorded  case  of  a  man's  heart 
being  adversely  affected  by  the  sight  of  a 


My  Old  Fishing-Pole          145 

cork  pulled  under  the  surface  of  a  pond. 

If  one  loves  life  and  would  continue 
long  in  it,  let  him  fish.  Fishermen  grow 
in  wisdom  as  they  grow  in  years. 

As  Izaak  Walton  hath  it: 

I  have  found  it  to  be  a  real  truth,  that  the  sit- 
ting by  the  river's  side  is  not  only  the  quietest 
and  fittest  place  for  contemplation,  but  will  in- 
vite an  angler  to  it;  and  this  seems  to  be  main- 
tained by  the  learned  Peter  Du  Moulin,  who  in 
his  discourse  of  the  fulfilling  of  the  Prophecies, 
observes,  that  when  God  intended  to  reveal  any 
future  events  or  high  notions  to  his  prophets,  he 
then  carried  them  either  to  the  deserts  or  the  sea- 
shore, and  having  so  separated  them  from  amidst 
the  press  of  people  and  business,  and  the  cares  of 
the  world,  he  might  settle  their  mind  in  a  quiet 

repose,  and  there  make  them  fit  for  revelation. 
v 

No  great  philosophy,  as  far  as  I  know, 
has  been  born  on  either  the  bleachers  or 
the  links:  but  how  many  of  the  ideas  that 
have  made  men  truer  and  nobler  have 
come  out  of  long  days  on  the  bank,  when 
there  were  no  bites! 

Fishing  is  human  life  epitomized. 

There  is  the  water,  calm,  inscrutable, 


146          More  Power  to  You 

impenetrable, —  the  symbol  of  fate, —  into 
which  every  man  casts  his  line. 

What  lies  at  the  bottom  of  it  for  him 
no  man  may  see.  The  tiny  minnow  of 
misfortune  which  nibbles  away  his  bait, 
may  be  followed  the  next  moment  by  a 
monstrous  catch  of  good  luck,  sweeping 
him  almost  off  his  feet. 

What  happened  yesterday  in  this  very 
spot  is  no  augury  of  what  may  take  place 
to-day.  Always  there  is  the  hope  that  the 
next  fling  of  the  line  will  bring  the  reward: 
always  the  lure  of  the  one  more  try. 

And  as  one  grows  older  in  fishing,  even 
as  one  grows  older  in  living,  there  comes 
the  same  consoling  truth  —  that  one  need 
not  catch  big  fish  in  order  to  be  happy: 
that  the  spirit  of  the  fishing  is  more  im- 
portant than  the  size  of  the  catch:  that 
he  who  fishes  well  must  fish  with  a  calm 
and  tranquil  soul,  drawing  his  reward 
from  the  joy  of  his  fishing  rather  than 
from  the  weight  of  his  fish. 

To  one  who  can  tune  his  soul  to  it,  there 
is  consolation  in  fishing,  and  healing  and 
peace. 


My  Old  Fishing-Pole         147 

After  their  Great  Friend  had  gone,  the 
disciples  of  Jesus  were  desolate.  Where 
should  they  turn?  What  could  they  do? 

And  Simon  Peter,  seeking  comfort,  an- 
swered: "  I  go  a-fishing." 

Every  true  fisherman  in  the  world 
knows  exactly  how  he  felt. 


XXXV 

IT  'S   A    GOOD   OLD   WORLD   IF   YOU 
KNOW    HOW   TO   BREATHE 

I  ONCE  had  the  misfortune  to  know  a 
pessimist.     There  was  some   excuse 
for   his   pessimism.     He   was   a   narrow- 
chested  chap  threatened  with  tuberculosis. 

He  had  given  himself  up  for  lost. 

But  one  night  somebody  induced  him  to 
go  to  a  singing  school. 

I  saw  him  a  year  later.  His  chest  was 
filled  out;  there  was  a  sparkle  in  his  eye; 
his  laugh  could  be  heard  a  city  block  away. 
He  was  a  resurrected  and  transformed 
man. 

What  had  happened  to  him?  The  sim- 
plest thing  in  the  world. 

He  had  simply  learned  how  to  breathe. 

The    average    man    or    woman    goes 
through  life  with  one  third  of  his  or  her 
lung  capacity  totally  unused. 
148 


How  to  Breathe  149 

That  is  why,  when  you  run,  you  get  a 
"  stitch  in  your  side."  The  stitch  is 
caused  by  the  unfolding  of  some  of  the 
lung  tissue  that  you  ought  to  use  but  do 
not. 

Even  when  you  practise  deep  breathing 
exercises  you  probably  do  not  fill  your  en- 
tire lung  capacity.  At  least,  so  Dr.  Wil- 
liam Lee  Howard  says  in  his  interesting 
book,  "  Breathe  and  Be  Well." 

You  expand  your  chest:  but  the  really 
important  part  of  your  breathing  is  done 
with  your  diaphragm  —  a  big  flat  muscle 
that  forms  the  floor  of  your  chest. 

And  the  abdominal  muscles  are  the  boys 
you  need  to  train  if  you  are  to  get  the  most 
out  of  your  diaphragm. 

Fill  your  lungs  until  you  feel  your  stom- 
ach muscles  pressing  hard  against  your 
belt. 

That  means  that  your  diaphragm  has 
straightened  down  and  is  massaging  the 
top  of  your  stomach  and  intestines  — 
helping  along  with  the  process  of  elimina- 
tion. 

When  you  breathe  out,  do  it  forcibly, 


150          More  Power  to  You 

with  the  stomach  muscles:  like  a  horse 
snorting  —  but  without  the  snort 

Your  stomach  and  intestines  will  be 
forced  up  against  the  diaphragm  again  and 
given  another  massage. 

Breathing  in  is  important,  but  breath* 
ing  out  is  much  more  important. 

A  majority  of  the  ills  to  which  modern 
man  is  victim  originate  in  the  intes- 
tines. 

And  the  chief  of  them  —  auto-intoxica- 
tion, constipation  —  would  disappear  if 
the  stomach  muscles  got  the  exercise  they 
ought  to  get  through  deep,  forcible  breath- 
ing. 

Doctors  have  long  known  that  massage 
of  the  abdomen  actually  increases  the  num- 
ber of  red  corpuscles. 

Formerly  it  was  thought  that  the  mas- 
sage simply  located  and  chased  into  cir- 
culation a  lot  of  red  corpuscles  that  were 
lying  around  in  blind  alleys. 

That  is  part  of  the  explanation :  here  is 
the  other  part. 

There  is  secreted  in  the  suprarenal 
glands,  as  Dr.  Howard  explains,  a  sub- 


How  to  Breathe  151 

stance  called  epinephrin,  a  very  powerful 
stimulant  to  the  red  corpuscles. 

"  Massage  of  the  abdomen  drives  the 
epinephrin  into  action,  which  forces  the 
blood-cells  to  take  up  oxygen  —  //  by 
proper  breathing  you  are  furnishing  the 
oxygen" 

Read  sometime  a  book  by  a  man  like 
Thoreau,  or  John  Burroughs,  or  Stewart 
Edward  White  —  one  of  the  great  open- 
air  writers. 

Then,  while  the  impression  of  its  rich, 
bounding  optimism  is  still  strong  upon 
you,  pick  up  a  book  written  by  one  of  the 
Russian  novelists,  or  by  one  of  our  mod- 
ern long-haired  writers  who  believe  that 
realism  necessarily  means  murder  and 
drunkenness  and  prostitution. 

What  a  difference!  And  what  makes 
the  difference? 

The  realist  will  tell  you  that  it  is  be- 
cause he  thinks  deeply,  while  the  optimistic 
writer  thinks  superficially. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  difference  is  not 
in  the  brains  of  the  two  men,  but  in  their 
livers. 


152          More  Power  to  You 

It  is  not  the  depth  of  their  thinking  so 
much  as  the  depth  of  their  lungs. 

The  corpuscles  of  the  one  are  red  and 
fed  with  oxygen:  the  corpuscles  of  the 
other  are  pale  and  fed  with  cigarette  smoke 
and  germs. 

"  For  what,  after  all,  is  Life?  "  asks  an 
old  Sanskrit  quotation.  And  answers : 

"  Life  is  the  interval  between  one  breath 
and  another  —  he  who  only  half  breathes 
only  half  lives." 


XXXVI 

WM.    HOHENZOLLERN,    LOCK   BOX  I, 
BERLIN 

DEAR  WlLHELM: 
On  the  day  I  write  this  the  Presi- 
dent is  about  to  ask  Congress  to  vote  that 
you  and  my  folks  are  at  war. 

I  see  by  the  papers  that  some  of  your 
employees  do  not  take  this  very  seriously. 
So  I  think  I  ought  to  write  you,  and  tell 
you  exactly  what  it  means. 

It  means  —  I  say  it  without  rancor,  Wil- 
helm,  and  purely  as  a  matter  of  giving  you 
the  customary  notice  —  it  means  that  your 
services  as  King  will  no  longer  be  required. 

So  far  as  we  are  concerned,  you  might 
as  well  begin  right  now  to  clean  out  your 
desk.  When  our  government  writes  to 
Berlin  next  time,  the  envelop  may  go  to 
the  same  address,  but  it  will  bear  a  differ- 
ent name. 

i53 


More  Power  to  You 

We  have  come  to  this  conclusion  sol- 
emnly, Wilhelm.  No  nation  ever  went 
into  war  with  so  little  flag-waving  and 
cheering. 

We  are  not  fighting  for  revenge,  nor  for 
territory,  nor  to  win  a  "  place  in  the  sun." 
We  are  going  to  war  to  win  peace  for  the 
world  —  for  this  generation  and  all  gen- 
erations to  come. 

We  have  made  up  our  minds,  very  so- 
berly, that  permanent  peace  must  rest  on 
certain  fixed  foundations.  That  is  the 
reason  we  can  not  make  a  permanent  peace 
with  you,  Wilhelm. 

For  the  first  of  these  foundations  is 
Truth. 

I  am  not  going  to  chide  you  with  the 
"  scrap  of  paper"  incident:  nor  remind 
you  of  all  the  shifty,  halting  explanations 
you  made  when  our  boats  were  sunk. 
Zimmermann's  last  effort  is  enough  to  re- 
member. 

On  the  very  day  when  he  was  telling 
us  how  friendly  you  are  to  us,  he  was 
promising  to  help  Mexico  take  our 


To  Wilhelm  Hohenzollern     155 

Southwest  away  and  Japan  our  Pacific 
Coast. 

Your  people  we  are  willing  to  trust,  Wil- 
helm; but  we  have  had  enough  of  your 
employees.  The  new  world  peace  must  be 
written  on  a  whole  sheet  of  paper,  not  a 
scrap. 

And  the  second  foundation  of  the  new 
world  peace,  Wilhelm,  is  Democracy. 

Kings  may  have  been  all  right  for  the 
little  one-cylinder  States  of  the  Middle 
Ages.  But  there  will  never  be  a  succes- 
sion of  men  strong  enough  and  wise 
enough  to  drive  the  big  twin-six  modern 
State. 

You  may  point  to  your  splendid  ances- 
tor, Frederick  the  Great;  and  I  admit  his 
ability.  But  who  came  after  him,  Wil- 
helm? Do  you  remember?  Frederick 
William  the  Fat! 

Charlemagne  was  pretty  successful  at 
kinging:  but  a  few  years  after  Charle- 
magne whom  do  we  see?  Charles  the 
Simple! 

Even  granting  that  you  have  governed 


156          More  Power  to  You 

your  people  more  wisely  than  they  could 
govern  themselves  —  look  at  your  oldest 
boy,  Wilhelm.  And,  honestly,  just  be- 
tween ourselves,  has  n't  the  king  business 
pretty  well  run  out  ? 

As  long  as  Russia  was  ruled  by  a  Czar, 
I  did  not  mind  you  so  much.  There 
seemed  no  real  hope  for  universal  peace, 
anyhow. 

But  the  world  is  going  democratic,  Wil- 
helm :  and  universal  peace  seems,  at  last,  to 
be  within  the  range  of  possibility.  For  if 
history  teaches  any  lesson  at  all,  it  is  this 
—  that  it  is  tremendously  difficult  to  get 
democracies  into  war. 

When  the  smoke  of  war  has  cleared 
away,  and  you  are  farming  quietly  some- 
where, Wilhelm,  you  will  begin  to  see 
things  more  clearly. 

You  will  begin  to  understand  that  what 
is  to  blame  for  the  loss  of  your  job  is,  after 
all,  nothing  less  than  the  Christian  religion 
itself. 

Nineteen  hundred  years  ago  Jesus  Christ 
went  about  telling  men  that  they  were 
children  of  God. 


To  Wilhelm  Hohenzollern     157 

If  that  is  true, —  if  all  men  are  children 
of  God, —  then  all  men  are  the  equals  of 
their  kings. 

And  now,  after  nineteen  hundred  years, 
Wilhelm,  all  men  are  about  to  find  that 
great  truth  out. 


XXXVII 

GENERALLY    SPEAKING,    A    JOB    IS    GOOD 

IN   PROPORTION   TO   THE   AMOUNT   OF 

STUDY   REQUIRED   TO   MASTER   IT 

YESTERDAY  morning,  when  I  rode 
up  in  the  elevator,  the  starter  was 
breaking  in  a  new  elevator-boy. 

At  noon,  when  I  went  out  to  lunch,  the 
new  boy  was  running  the  car  alone.  He 
had  on  a  uniform,  and  was  starting  and 
stopping  with  the  confidence  of  a  veteran. 

From  apprentice  to  professional  in  a 
couple  of  hours. 

Last  week  I  saw  a  veteran  motorman 
teaching  his  work  to  a  youngster.  On 
Tuesday  and  Wednesday  the  two  were  on 
the  front  platform  together:  on  Thurs- 
day the  new  man  was  operating  the  car 
alone. 

It  is  a  sight  I  have  seen  very  often:  yet 
I  never  see  it  without  a  feeling  of  wonder. 
158 


Price  of  a  Good  Job  159 

What  thoughts  are  in  that  young  fel- 
low's head  as  he  receives  his  instructions 
from  the  gray-haired  veteran? 

How  can  he  fail  to  look  forward  and 
see  in  the  older  man  a  picture  of  himself 
twenty  years  from  now? 

He  is  taking  up  a  low  paid  job  —  a  job 
with  no  future.  Twenty  years  from  now 
he  will  be  just  where  he  is  to-day  —  only 
older,  with  a  grasp  on  the  job  somewhat 
less  secure.  His  experience  will  count  for 
nothing,  because  it  is  experience  that  any 
other  man  can  gain  in  a  couple  of  days. 

He  may,  from  time  to  time,  force  an 
increase  in  his  pay.  But  the  increases  will 
not  be  large.  Why? 

Because  he  learned  the  job  in  two  days. 
And  in  any  other  two  days  the  company 
can  find  plenty  of  men  who  will  learn 
just  as  fast  and  take  the  job  away  from 
him. 

Recently  I  met  in  a  hotel  restaurant  a 
friend  of  mine  who  has  just  come  back 
from  England  after  taking  special  work  in 
surgery  under  some  of  the  greatest  men  in 
the  world. 


160          More  Power  to  You 

He  is  thirty-one  years  old:  it  is  fourteen 
years  since  he  entered  college. 

For  ten  of  those  fourteen  years  he  has 
been  in  medical  schools,  in  hospitals,  and  in 
foreign  countries  studying. 

Fourteen  long  years  of  hard,  uninter- 
rupted study.  Years  made  more  difficult 
by  the  necessity  for  self-support:  and  filled 
sometimes  with  questionings,  as  he  has  seen 
his  college  class-mates  moving  forward  to 
their  places  as  well  paid  physicians,  and 
he  lingering  still  in  school. 

Yet  with  what  result? 

He  has  acquired  a  specialized  training 
such  as  only  a  few  other  men  in  New  York 
possess. 

He  will  begin  life  with  an  income  of 
several  thousands ;  he  will  pay  back  his  edu- 
cational debts  in  a  couple  of  years;  in  ten 
years  his  income  will  be  tens  of  thousands. 

Fourteen  years  of  his  life  went  into  the 
mastery  of  his  profession.  But  he  need 
have  no  fear  of  losing  what  he  has  gained. 
No  other  man  can  displace  him,  except  at 
the  cost  of  fourteen  years  of  work. 

I  would  not  say  one  word  in  deprecia- 


Price  of  a  Good  Job  161 

tion  of  honest  toil  in  humble  places.  The 
routine  activities  of  life  must  be  carried 
on:  the  world  has  need  of  elevator-men 
and  motormen.  And,  according  to  the 
loyalty  and  courage  with  which  these  do 
their  work,  they  are  entitled  to  the  world's 
gratitude  and  respect. 

My  quarrel  is  not  with  the  elevator-boy 
who  can  not  be  anything  but  an  elevator- 
boy:  but  with  the  boy  who  might  fill  a 
larger  place  in  life  if  only  he  were  not  too 
lazy  to  try. 

I  would  see  every  young  man  filled,  if 
possible,  with  a  divine  discontent,  which 
would  make  him  unwilling  to  be  less  than 
his  very  best. 

Every  young  man  in  the  United  States 
ought  to  read  the  autobiography  of  Ben- 
jamin Franklin. 

See  with  what  painful  diligence  he 
taught  himself  to  write  good  English. 
Watch  him,  at  fourteen,  attacking  again 
the  arithmetic  that  he  had  three  times 
failed  to  pass  in  school,  and  conquering  it. 

See  Michelangelo,  old  and  blind,  still 
being  wheeled  into  the  great  galleries,  that 


162          More  Power  to  You 

he  might  with  his  fingers  trace  the  outlines 
of  the  statuary  —  true  to  his  life's  motto 
to  the  very  end:  Ancora  impara  — "  Still 
learning." 

4  The  gods  sell  anything  to  everybody 
at  a  fair  price,"  said  Emerson. 

And  when  he  said  it  he  epitomized  the 
philosophy  of  Business. 

The  job  that  the  gods  sell  for  two  hours' 
training  is  worth  just  what  it  costs. 

Only  that  job  is  worth  much  which  has 
tied  to  it  the  price-tag  of  constant,  unceas- 
ing study  and  work. 


XXXVIII 

THE   TIMES    THAT   TRY   MEN'S '  SOULS 

MOST  of  us  had  our  little  spiritual 
worlds  in  apple-pie  order  in  July, 
1914. 

We  had  figured  out  a  comfortable  phi- 
losophy for  ourselves. 

The  world  was  a  good  place  to  live  in : 
it  was  gradually  growing  better. 

War  was  a  thing  of  the  past.  With 
woman  suffrage,  widows'  pensions,  mini- 
mum wage  laws,  direct  primaries,  national 
prohibition,  and  all  the  rest,  we  were  al- 
most within  sight  of  the  millennium. 

God  in  His  Heaven,  all  right  with  the 
world. 

And  then,  suddenly,  out  of  the  clouds 
there  burst  upon  us  the  most  terrible  war 
in  history,  shattering  our  comfortable  phi- 
losophies, rocking  our  faith. 

We  saw  school-teachers,  lawyers,  bank- 


164          More  Power  to  You 

ers,  and  clergymen  marching  forth  in  clean 
new  uniforms  —  cultured,  civilized  human 
beings.  A  day  or  two  of  war,  and  presto ! 
mud  and  blood  spattered,  they  were  tear- 
ing at  one  another  like  savages. 

I  remember  once  talking  to  an  ex-mis- 
sionary who  had  worked  in  Turkey. 

He  had  come  back  to  this  country,  re- 
signed from  the  ministry,  and  entered  busi- 
ness. 

"  I  should  like  to  go  on  believing,"  he 
said;  "  but  how  can  I,  when  I  have  seen 
the  helpless  Armenians  massacred  in  the 
streets  for  no  crime  except  that  of  being 
Christians?  How  can  I  continue  to  be- 
lieve in  a  God  who  allows  His  people  to 
perish  because  they  worship  Him?  " 

B.  Fay  Mills,  the  great  evangelist,  trav- 
eled in  his  middle  years  through  some  of 
the  towns  where  he  had  held  meetings  as 
a  young  man  and  gained  thousands  of 
converts. 

His  converts  had  back-slidden :  there 
was  almost  nothing  to  show  that  the  towns 
had  ever  been  swept  by  a  great  religious 
revival. 


Times  that  Try  Men's  Souls     16$ 

Mills,  saddened,  exclaimed:     "If  the 
work    was    of    God,    why    did    not    God 
preserve  it?"     And  he  lost  his  hold  on 
faith. 

Thousands  of  men  have,  in  the  quiet  of 
their  own  hearts,  gone  through  a  searching 
process  in  the  past  two  years. 

Is  all  civilization,  then,  a  sham?  Is  all 
our  faith  in  a  gradual  progress  toward  bet- 
ter things  a  mere  delusion?  Is  there  no 
God?  Or,  if  there  be  a  God,  is  He  One 
who  does  not  care  —  who  sits  idly  in  His 
Heaven,  watching  the  evil  in  the  world  blot 
out  the  good? 

A  hundred  years  ago  the  wars  of  Na- 
poleon tried  men's  souls  as  the  war  with 
Germany  is  trying  them  to-day. 

The  finest  young  men  of  Europe  bled  to 
death,  the  wealth  of  civilization  spilled  in 
war  to  feed  one  man's  crazed  ambition. 

Why  were  such  things  allowed  to  be? 

In  the  search  for  the  answer  to  that 
question,  men  lost  their  faith. 

But  one  man,  Baron  Stein,  did  not  lose 
faith.  It  was  his  influence  on  Prussia  and 
Austria,  and  later  on  the  unstable  Czar, 


i66          More  Power  to  You 

that  did  as  mux:h  as  anything  else  to  corn- 
pass  the  downfall  of  Napoleon. 

"  His  whole  conduct  at  this  period," 
says  Andrew  D.  White,  "  and  indeed 
throughout  all  the  years  of  his  official  life, 
was  due,  not  merely  to  his  hatred  of  the 
oppressor  of  his  country,  but  to  a  deep 
faith  that  Napoleon's  career  was  a  chal- 
lenge to  the  Almighty,  and  that  it  there- 
fore could  not  continue." 

Against  that  faith  Napoleon  fought  in 
vain. 

We  have  passed  through  trying  days: 
we  face  days  even  more  difficult. 

It  is  no  time  jto  lose  faith.  It  is  a  time 
to  know,  as  Stein  knew,  that  we  fight  to 
win,  because  there  fight  against  us  those 
whose  whole  career  in  this  war  has  been 
<c  a  challenge  to  the  Almighty  "— *-  such  a 
challenge  as  never  has  and  never  can  finally 
prevail. 


XXXIX 

"  THEREWITH   TO   BE    CONTENT  " 

LAST  night  I  ran  across  this  paragraph 
in  the  newly  published  note-books  of 
Samuel  Butler : 

I  imagine  that  life  can  give  nothing  much  bet- 
ter or  much  worse  than  what  I  have  myself  ex- 
perienced. I  should  say  I  have  proved  pretty 
well  the  extremes  of  mental  pleasure  and  pain; 
and  so  I  believe,  each  in  his  own  way,  does  al- 
most every  man. 

That,  when  you  come  to  think  about  it, 
is  wholly  true.  Some  men  have  more  of 
the  luxuries  of  life  than  others:  but  those 
experiences  which  are  richest  in  pleasure 
are  the  common  heritage  of  us  all. 

Charles  M.  Schwab,  at  last  reports,  had 
more  money  than  I  —  but  just  what  can  he 
buy  with  it  ? 

Three  meals  a  day,  first  of  all.  They 
will  doubtless  cost  more  to  serve  than  my 
167 


i68          More  Power  to  You 

three,  but  if  Charlie  enjoys  them  any  more 
he  is  going  some. 

A  roof  over  his  head.  It  will  be  a 
wider  and  steeper  roof  than  mine,  and 
more  rain  will  run  off  it ;  but  the  rain  that 
runs  off  mine  will  be  just  as  wet,  and 
underneath  I  shall  be  just  as  dry. 

A  good  night's  sleep  —  if  he  's  lucky. 

He  can  own  more  of  the  world's  surface 
than  I.  But,  try  as  he  may,  he  can  not 
breathe  up  any  more  of  its  air;  he  can 
not  absorb  any  more  of  its  sunshine;  he 
can  not  bribe  the  ocean  to  give  him  any 
more  invigorating  bath;  nor  the  evening 
stars  to  shine  any  brighter  over  his  estate. 

The  world  is  full  of  pleasant  sights  and 
sounds  and  smells,  and  his  ears  and  nose 
and  eyes  do  not  bring  him  any  sensation 
a  particle  more  sweet  than  mine  bring  to 
me. 

The  world  is  full  of  lovely  women,  and 
each  of  us  can  love  and  marry  only  one. 

Compared  with  the  blessings  we  have  in 
common,  the  few  paltry  blessings  which  he 
has  and  I  have  not  are  insignificant. 

I  have  tasted  these  rich  men's  blessings. 


'Therewith  to  be  Content"      169 

I  have  driven  an  automobile,  and  sat  in 
the  front  row  at  the  Winter  Garden,  and 
met  Teddy  Roosevelt,  and  worn  silk  hose, 
and  had  my  finger-nails  manicured.  And 
none  of  these  luxuries  is  one,  two,  three 
with  a  good  night's  sleep,  or  a  swim  at 
Coney,  or  corned  beef  and  cabbage  when 
one  has  worked  all  the  morning  in  a  gar 
den  and  is  really  hungry. 

The  habit  of  contentment  is  formed,  not 
from  without,  but  from  within ;  and  it  is  a 
wonderfully  satisfying  habit  to  own. 

There  is  no  duty  we  so  much  underestimate 
[says  Stevenson]  as  the  duty  of  being  happy. 
By  being  happy,  we  sow  anonymous  benefits  upon 
the  world  which  remain  unknown  even  to  our- 
selves; or,  when  they  are  disclosed,  surprise  no- 
body so  much  as  the  benefactor.  A  happy  man 
or  woman  is  a  better  thing  to  find  than  a  five- 
pound  note.  He  or  she  is  a  radiating  focus  of 
good  will,  and  their  entrance  into  a  room  is  as 
though  another  candle  had  been  lighted. 

It  is  strange  that  contentment  should  not 
be  more  widespread,  considering  how  very 
common  and  close  at  hand  are  the  elements 
that  go  into  it. 


170          More  Power  to  You 

Work  —  first  of  all. 

Get  work,  get  work  —  be  sure  't  is  better  far 
Than  what  you  work  to  get. 

Simple  tastes  —  the  power  of  finding 
great  satisfaction  in  little  things  —  is  an- 
other ingredient. 

To  watch  the  corn  grow  or  the  blossoms  set 
[as  Ruskin  has  it]  ;  to  draw  hard  breath  over 
plowshare  or  spade;  to  read,  to  think,  to  love, 
to  pray:  these  are  the  things  that  make  men 
happy. 

I  would  not  have  any  man  slothful: 
there  is  a  difference  between  the  soul  that 
does  not  worry  and  the  soul  that  merely 
does  not  care.  The  man  who  stands  still, 
or  slides  back,  is  entitled  to  no  respect. 

But  he  who  is  wise  enjoys  the  various 
stages  of  his  progress  while  he  is  passing 
through  them.  St.  Paul,  for  instance,  did 
a  pretty  good-sized  job  in  the  world,  and 
left  a  shining  record. 

He  was  forever  "  pressing  forward  to 
his  goal."  Yet  it  was  he  also  who  wrote : 

"  For  I  have  learned,  in  whatsoever 
state  I  am,  therewith  to  be  content." 


XL 

"  THE   BUSINESS    ...   IS   UNDRAMATIC  " 

1LIKE  Mr.  Roosevelt,  but  I  am  glad  he 
is  not  to  be  allowed  to  raise  an  army. 

He  would  unquestionably  put  glamour 
and  picturesqueness  and  glory  into  the  war. 
Glamour  and  picturesqueness  and  glory  are 
just  the  qualities  that  I  want  to  see  taken 
away  from  war. 

"  The  business  in  hand,"  said  the  Presi- 
dent, in  refusing  the  Roosevelt  division, 
"  is  undramatic" 

Never  before  has  war  had  that  word 
applied  to  it. 

Always  people  have  entered  on  war  with 
bands  playing,  and  red  fire,  and  fervid 
speeches,  and  cries  of  "  Remember  the 
Maine"  or  "  Fifty-four  Forty  or  Fight," 
or  "  On  to  Canada,"  or  "  On  to  Paris." 

They  have  been  thrilled  by  the  spectacle 
of  heroes  leaping  to  their  nation's  call. 
171 


172          More  Power  to  You 

This,  so  far  as  possible,  is  to  be  a  war 
without  heroics.  Men  will  not  leap  to 
arms;  they  will  be  assigned  to  arms. 
Troops  will  be  sent  quietly  away  in  the 
night.  We  shall  see  nothing  of  the  fabled 
glory  of  war:  only  the  somberness  of  war 
—  the  hard,  drab,  unpleasant  necessity. 

We  shall  fight  efficiently,  but  it  will  be 
the  fight  of  men  who  do  a  bitter  duty  with 
solemn  hearts. 

And,  going  into  war  in  this  spirit,  we 
shall  have  struck  a  blow  against  war. 

It  is  the  reproach  of  historians  [says  John 
Richard  Green]  that  they  have  often  turned  his- 
tory into  a  mere  record  of  butchery  of  men  by 
their  fellow  men. 

If  that  is  true, —  if  the  wars  of  the  na- 
tions have  been  allowed  to  overshadow 
everything  else  in  history, —  it  is  because 
men  have  been  taught  to  believe  that  war 
is  glorious,  and  the  achievements  of  peace 
prosaic. 

To  this  war  we  are  assigning  men  as  if 
they  were  assigned  to  jury  service  or  to 
mending  the  State  highways.  We  are  re- 


An  Undramatic  War          173 

ducing  glamour  to  a  minimum.  It  is  a 
business  undramatic. 

I  have  read  many  of  the  books  that  have 
been  written  in  extenuation  of  war. 

I  have  read  John  Ruskin,  who  says : 

The  common  notion  that  peace  and  the  vir- 
tues of  civil  life  flourish  together  I  have  found 
to  be  wholly  untenable.  Peace  and  the  vices  of 
civil  life  only  flourish  together. 

And  again : 

All  healthy  men  like  fighting  and  like  the  sense 
of  danger.  All  brave  women  like  to  hear  of 
their  fighting  and  of  their  facing  danger. 

And  still  again: 

No  great  art  ever  rose  on  earth  but  among  a 
nation  of  soldiers. 

We  shall  doubtless  hear  much  talk  of 
this  kind  in  the  months  to  come :  I  mean  to 
oppose  such  talk  at  every  opportunity. 

I  believe  the  present  war  was  forced 
upon  us;  and  that,  being  in  it,  it  is  our 
duty  to  push  it,  with  every  ounce  of  energy 
in  us,  to  a  speedy  and  successful  end. 


174          More  Power  to  You 

But  that  war  itself  is  either  beneficial  or 
glorious  I  deny. 

I  agree  with  Seeley  that  "  the  Roman 
Empire  perished  for  lack  of  men." 

Marius  and  Cinna  had  slain  the  aristo- 
crats :  Sulla  had  slain  the  democrats.  And 
when  there  were  none  left  but  cowards  and 
slaves  to  breed  sons  for  Rome,  the  bar- 
barians overwhelmed  and  destroyed  them. 

I  believe  that  one  reason  England  has 
grown  so  great  is  because  she  has  managed 
to  avoid  serious  losses  of  men  in  most  of 
the  wars  of  the  Continent.  While  Europe 
was  bleeding,  her  people  were  busy  attend- 
ing to  their  business  at  home. 

The  Civil  War  yielded  an  abundant 
crop  of  heroes,  and  likewise  spread  its 
hateful  shadow  over  our  public  life  for  a 
quarter  of  a  century.  No  man  could  run 
for  office  unless  he  wore  a  uniform:  there 
was  no  argument  but  the  bloody  shirt. 

We  want  no  such  after-math  to  this  war. 

We  shall  do  our  greatest  service  to 
America  and  to  civilization  if  we  fight,  so 
far  as  possible,  without  hate.  If,  while 
bending  every  energy  to  winning  this  war, 


An  Undramatic  War          175 

we  keep  alive  in  our  hearts  a  horror  of  all 
wars. 

If  we  do  not  allow  ourselves  to  forget 
for  a  single  instant  that,  through  the  un- 
dramatic  business  of  war,  we  are  fighting 
for  the  glories  and  the  blessings  of  univer- 
sal peace. 


XLI 

SOME  MEN  LOSE  FIVE  MINUTES  EARLY  IN 
LIFE   AND   NEVER   FIND   IT   AFTERWARD 

I  LIKE  to  reach  the  station  a  few  min- 
utes early  in  the  afternoon,  and  watch 
the  commuters  running  for  the  trains. 

I  have  been  watching  them  now  for  al- 
most two  years,  and  I  know  a  lot  of  them 
by  sight. 

There  are  the  ladies  and  old  men,  in- 
frequent visitors  to  the  city,  unused  to  busi- 
ness, who  arrive  long  before  train-time. 

There  are  the  regular  business  men,  who 
arrive  one  minute  ahead. 

And  —  just  as  the  gate  is  about  to  slam 
—  there  come  piling  across  the  station, 
breathless,  coat-tails  flying,  the  members  of 
the  Just  a  Little  Late  Club. 

I  used  to  sympathize  with  them  at  first, 
supposing  them  to  be  unfortunates  who  had 
missed  a  car  or  lost  their  watches. 
176 


Just  a  Little  Late  177 

But  after  almost  two  years  of  watching 
I  know  different. 

The  membership  of  the  Just  a  Little 
Late  Club  does  not  change  appreciably 
from  day  to  day.  Night  after  night  it  is 
the  very  same  crowd  of  men  who  have  to 
run  the  last  few  blocks  for  the  train. 

Membership  in  the  Just  a  Little  Late 
Club  is  not  a  misfortune:  it  is  a  habit. 
And  one  of  the  most  exasperating  habits  in 
the  world. 

Napoleon  said:  "  I  beat  the  Austrians 
because  they  did  not  know  the  value  of 
five  minutes." 

He  beat  the  Austrians,  but  he  did  not 
exterminate  them.  Thousands  of  their 
descendants  and  relatives  still  wave  —  still 
with  no  appreciation  of  the  value  of  time; 
still  a  nuisance  in  the  business  world. 

There  should  be  some  way  of  marking 
them.  They  should  be  compelled  to  wear 
a  button  or  a  distinctive  uniform  of  some 
sort,  so  that  the  man  who  makes  an  ap- 
pointment with  one  of  them  might  be  pro- 
tected against  taking  the  appointment  too 
seriously. 


178          More  Power  to  You 

"  Never  be  on  time,"  said  Mark  Twain. 
"  You  waste  too  much  time  waiting  for  the 
other  fellow." 

He  had  in  mind  the  enormous  member- 
ship of  the  Just  a  Little  Late  Club. 

I  was  lunching  the  other  day  in  a  hotel 
with  a  man  who  has  much  more  money 
than  I  have.  And  a  man  passed  us  who 
has  much  more  than  both  of  us  together. 

He  is  a  captain  of  other  people's  indus- 
try as  well  as  of  his  own.  He  began  work 
twenty  years  ago  as  an  office-boy,  and  to- 
day heads  one  of  the  great  manufacturing 
concerns  of  his  city. 

"  A  wonderful  fellow,"  said  my  friend, 
pointing  to  him.  "  Last  year  I  had  a  long 
series  of  negotiations  with  him  about  the 
formation  of  a  new  company.  It  was 
necessary  for  us  to  meet  practically  every 
day  for  nearly  three  months.  In  all  that 
time  he  was  never  late  but  twice,  and  then 
only  for  a  few  minutes.  And  each  time 
he  sent  word  to  me  from  his  office  telling 
me  that  he  would  be  late." 

J.  P.  Morgan  figured  that  every  hour  of 


Just  a  Little  Late  179 

his  time  was  worth  $1,000,  and  he  had  no 
patience  with  men  who  were  late  for  ap- 
pointments, or  who,  when  they  came  to  see 
him,  did  not  give  him  his  money's  worth 
in  exchange  for  the  time  they  took. 

"  It  is  not  necessary  for  me  to  live," 
said  Pompey,  "  but  it  is  necessary  that  I  be 
at  a  certain  point  at  a  certain  time." 

And  Lord  Nelson  said:  "  I  owe  all  my 
success  in  life  to  having  been  a  quarter  of 
an  hour  before  my  time." 

I  hold  up  the  record  of  these  famous 
men,  in  the  faint  hope  that  it  may  do  some 
good. 

And  yet,  the  hope  is  very  faint.  The 
habit  of  unpromptness  is  so  very  tenacious, 
so  difficult  to  break. 

If  I  am  fortunate  enough  to  be  inside 
when  the  pearly  gates  are  closed  on  the 
judgment-day,  I  shall  know  what  to  ex- 
pect. 

Five  minutes  later  there  will  be  a  terrific 
battering  on  the  gate.  St.  Peter  may  be 
surprised,  but  I  shall  not  be. 

When  the  gates  swing  open  again,  there 


180          More  Power  to  You 

they  will  be  —  some  of  the  most  lovable 
and  exasperating  people  who  ever  lived  — • 
the  members  of  the  Just  a  Little  Late  Club 
—  panting,  apologetic,  explanatory  to  the 
last 


XLII 

THE   IMMORTALITY   OF   INFLUENCE 

I  HAVE  been  reading  a  wonderfully 
illuminating  essay  on  Bismarck,  by 
Andrew  D.  White. 

And  I  thought  to  myself:  "  It  is  not 
an  army  that  the  Allies  are  fighting,  but  an 
idea.  It  is  the  Bismarckian  conception  of 
the  right  of  kings,  and  the  right  of  might 
in  the  world,  which  must  be  blotted  out 
before  this  war  is  won." 

Bismarck  believed  in  the  divine  right  of 
kings,  when  even  kings  themselves  had  al- 
most ceased  to  believe  in  it. 

King  William  of  Prussia  had  actually 
signed  his  abdication,  and  was  preparing 
to  flee  his  throne,  because  a  majority  of 
Parliament  was  against  him. 

Bismarck  made  him  ashamed  of  his 
weakness.  What  right  had  Parliament  to 
interfere  with  the  government?  he  de- 
181 


182          More  Power  to  You 

manded.  What  right  had  the  people  to 
question  their  King?  Rule  in  spite  of 
Parliament:  defy  its  majority:  send  its 
members  home. 

So  the  King  stuck  to  the  throne:  and 
Bismarck,  governing  in  spite  of  Parlia- 
ment, made  him  Emperor  of  Germany. 

It  was  he  who  transformed  the  German 
people  from  a  discordant,  factious  mass 
into  a  compact  unit,  aggressively  demand- 
ing their  place  in  the  sun. 

It  was  he  who  picked  the  quarrel  with 
Austria,  not  for  any  principle,  but  because 
the  boundaries  of  Germany  must  be 
rounded  out. 

When  the  yearned-for  war  with  France 
seemed  about  to  dissolve  into  peace,  it  was 
he  who  altered  the  reading  of  a  telegram, 
and  so  goaded  the  French  to  a  declaration. 

It  was  he  who  first  used  the  German 
fleet  to  bully  weaker  peoples;  he  who  rat- 
tled the  sword  whenever  German  interests 
were,  even  in  the  least  degree,  encroached 
upon. 

Curious  mixture  that  he  was  of  medieval 
ideals  and  modern  efficiency.  Deeply  re- 


The  Immortality  of  Influence     183 

ligious,  and  unsparingly  brutal.  Acknowl- 
edging God,  and  trampling  on  the  rights 
of  his  brothers.  Believing  the  Almighty 
on  his  side,  and  scrupling  at  nothing. 
Gentle  and  considerate  in  his  family  life, 
boorish  in  his  public  manners;  a  scholar  in 
his  library,  a  glutton  at  his  table. 

It  has  taken  the  blood  of  millions  to 
wash  out  of  the  world  the  continuing  in- 
fluence of  Bismarck. 

I  know  a  certain  college  fraternity  whose 
senior  delegation  ten  years  ago  had  a 
strong  man  in  it  who  ought  to  have  been  its 
leader.  Instead  of  which,  he  drank,  and 
left  the  fraternity  leaderless. 

As  a  result,  a  weak  group  of  freshmen 
was  chosen  that  year. 

Three  years  later,  when  those  freshmen 
were  about  to  become  seniors,  they,  in  turn, 
chose  a  weak  group  of  freshmen. 

For  ten  years  weak  delegations  followed 
one  another  in  that  fraternity,  the  influence 
of  one  bad  man  perpetuating  itself  long 
after  he  himself  had  passed. 

A  hundred  and  fifty  years  ago  there 
lived  a  man  called  Martin  Kalikak. 


184          More  Power  to  You 

He  was  a  soldier  in  the  Revolutionary 
army.  He  married  a  feeble-minded 
woman,  and  they  had  a  feeble-minded 
daughter.  Of  their  480  descendants,  143 
were  feeble-minded;  36  were  illegitimate; 
24  were  confirmed  alcoholics;  3  were  epi- 
leptics; 82  died  in  infancy;  3  were  criminal. 

For  more  than  a  hundred  and  fifty  years 
the  evil  that  Martin  Kalikak  did  has  —  in 
increasing  volume  —  lived  after  him. 

I  know  of  no  more  solemn  thought  than 
this  —  that  no  man's  influence  in  the  world 
really  ends  with  his  life;  that  the  most  in- 
consequential acts  may  reach  down,  from 
generation  to  generation,  through  the  ages. 

Of  course  there  is  the  brighter  side.  If 
the  evil  that  men  do  lives  after  them,  so 
does  the  good. 

If  sins  live  forever,  so  also  do  righteous 
acts;  if  unkindness  perpetuates  itself, 
smiles,  and  pleasant  words,  and  the  deed 
done  in  mercy,  but  soon  forgotten,  likewise 
are  immortal. 

Jefferson's  idea  that  "  governments  de- 
rive their  just  powers  from  the  consent  of 
the  governed,"  Lincoln's  idea  of  an  equal 


The  Immortality  of  Influence     185 

chance   for   every  man,   still  live   in  the 
world,  side  by  side  with  Bismarck's  idea. 
The  good  living  with  the  evil  — 
And  slowly,  little  by  little,  outliving  it. 


XLIII 

SOME  DAY  YOUR  EMPLOYER  WILL  WANT  TO 
KNOW  WHY  YOU  DO  NOT  PLAY  MORE 

WHENEVER  one  is  hard  up  for  a 
subject,  he  can  always  write  dis- 
couragingly  about  the  Fall  of  Rome. 

He  can  point  out  with  what  awful  speed 
America  is  hastening  to  the  same  destruc- 
tion. 

Rome  fell  because  its  citizens  became  too 
soft  and  craven  to  defend  it. 

America  has  been  full  of  those  who 
cried  out  that  we  should  be  committing  a 
crime  against  civilization  if  we  were  pre- 
pared to  defend  ourselves. 

Rome  fell  because  thrift  was  swallowed 
up  in  luxury. 

Of  all  the  nations  of  the  earth,  America 
is  the  least  thrifty. 

Rome   fell  because  its   citizens  ceased 
work  and  devoted  themselves  to  play. 
186 


Concerning  Play  187 

Rome  spent  millions  on  her  sports:  we 
spend  hundreds  of  millions. 

See  how  perfectly  the  shoe  fits? 

But  there  are  several  important  dis- 
tinctions to  be  made. 

One  is  this: 

The  Romans  did  not  play :  they  watched 
other  men  play. 

America  is  still  a  nation  where  every- 
body works.  It  is  rapidly  becoming  a 
nation  where  everybody  also  plays. 

And  that  is  a  sign  of  virility :  it  is  whole- 
some. 

Fifty  years  ago  a  man  felt  like  apolo- 
gizing to  his  boss  if  he  played:  the  time  is 
coming  when  he  will  have  to  explain  why 
it  is  he  does  not  play. 

Employers  want  men  who  can  bring  to 
their  work  more  than  mere  dogged  loyalty. 

They  want  enthusiasm;  a  fresh  point  of 
view;  a  mind  that  leaps  and  sparkles. 

Play  does  more  than  build  sturdy  bodies 
—  more  than  cleanse  tired  minds. 

It  builds  character;  self-control. 

The  school  and  the  office,  as  Dr.  Luther 
Gulick  has  pointed  out,  are  not  democ- 


i88          More  Power  to  You 

racies:  they  are  monarchies.  You  may 
not  like  the  rules,  but  you  must  abide  by 
them  nevertheless.  You  may  want  to  quit, 
but  you  can't. 

But  play  is  different. 

You  enter  it  of  your  own  volition:  you 
may  withdraw  when  you  will.  If  you 
abide  by  the  rules,  it  is  because  you  control 
yourself,  not  because  a  master  controls  you. 

If  you  want  to  quit  in  a  huff,  there  is  no 
one  to  prevent  it.  If  you  pout  under  de- 
feat, or  become  arrogant  with  victory,  you 
are  answerable  to  yourself  alone. 

In  business  you  are  controlled:  in  play 
you  must  be  self-controlled. 

'*  The  Battle  of  Waterloo  was  won  first 
on  the  English  cricket  fields." 

Many  a  man  on  Monday  morning,  when 
business  would  not  go  as  it  should,  has 
held  himself  steady  and  won  out  because 
on  Saturday  afternoon,  when  a  little  ball 
would  not  do  what  it  should,  he  lost 
neither  his  temper  nor  his  nerve. 

It  is  possible  to  overdo  play,  of  course. 

Herbert  Spencer  was  very  proud  of  his 


Concerning  Play  189 

game  of  billiards.  One  evening  he  invited 
a  strange  young  man  to  play. 

The  young  man  beat  him  three  games 
straight.  At  the  end  of  the  third  game 
Herbert  Spencer  put  up  his  cue  and  said: 
4  Young  man,  to  play  a  good  game  of  bil- 
liards is  the  accomplishment  of  a  gentle- 
man: to  play  too  good  a  game  of  billiards 
is  the  sign  of  a  misspent  youth." 

But  most  of  us  are  in  no  danger  of  over- 
doing play. 

We  are  much  more  likely  to  go  pound- 
ing along,  saying  to  ourselves:  'To- 
morrow, when  I  have  accumulated  my  pile, 
I  will  retire  from  business  and  play." 

And  some  day  they  will  carve  over  us: 
"  He  was  going  to  retire  —  to-morrow." 

Don't  wait  for  to-morrow.  Retire 
from  business  this  afternoon  at  four 
o'clock. 

By  to-morrow  morning  at  nine  you  '11  be 
back  at  your  desk,  keen  as  a  fighting  cock. 


XLIV 

A  LETTER  TO  A  YOUNG  MAN  WHO  WANTS 
A   BETTER  JOB 

YOU  ask  me  how  you  can  get  a  better 
job. 

My  answer  is  that  you  can't. 

All  over  the  country  are  millions  of 
young  men  who,  in  a  vague  sort  of  way, 
want  a  better  job:  and  here  and  there 
among  them  are  the  worth-while  few  who 
want  the  better  job. 

And  the  millions  wonder  why  the  few 
move  on,  while  they  stand  stationary  year 
after  year. 

You  must,  first  of  all,  pick  out  the  better 
job  —  some  particular  job  that  is  better 
than  yours.  Then  train  your  guns  on  that 
and  capture  it. 

You  tell  me  that  you  are  a  bookkeeper 
and  that  you  earn  $15  a  week. 
190 


A  Better  Job  191 

I  know  certified  public  accountants  who 
earn  $10,000  a  year  and  more. 

If  I  were  a  bookkeeper  earning  $15  a 
week,  I  should  go  out  for  a  public  account- 
ant's job.  I  might  die  on  the  road,  but 
whoever  found  my  body  would  notice  that 
my  face  was  toward  the  summit. 

Second:  You  can  never  make  anybody 
pay  you  more  money  until  you  have  more 
to  sell. 

I  can  advertise  in  a  newspaper  to-mor- 
row morning  and  have  a  hundred  bright 
young  men  here  at  eight  o'clock.  Each 
one  will  have  just  as  much  to  offer  me  as 
you  have:  the  same  two  years  of  high 
school;  the  same  experience  in  keeping 
books ;  the  same  good  record.  Every  one 
of  them  will  be  willing  to  work  for  $15, 
and  some  of  them  for  $12. 

The  only  way  you  can  lift  yourself  out 
of  that  $15  class  is  by  giving  yourself  an 
equipment  that  the  rest  of  the  fellows  in 
that  class  do  not  have.  In  other  words, 
by  study  —  by  education  —  by  specialized 
training. 

Third:     When  you  have  picked  out  the 


192         More  Power  to  You 

one  particular  better  job  that  you  want, 
when  you  have  fitted  yourself  for  it,  then 
be  careful  of  your  letter  of  application. 

If  Judge  Gary  or  Charles  M.  Schwab 
applied  for  a  job  by  letter  to-morrow,  they 
would  get  it  in  almost  any  big  business  in 
this  country,  even  if  their  applications  were 
written  in  lead  pencil  on  a  sheet  of  butcher 
paper. 

Their  personalities  and  abilities  are 
known.  Yours  are  not.  Your  letter  is 
your  representative.  For  heaven's  sake, 
if  you  have  in  you  any  spark  of  originality 
that  other  men  have  not,  make  your  letter 
a  tiny  bit  different  from  the  other  letters 
that  the  other  men  will  write. 

Go  downtown  and  pick  out  a  shade  of 
paper  and  a  size  of  envelop  that  will  be 
different.  Make  your  letter  stick  out 
among  the  hundred  letters  that  your  pros- 
pective employer  will  receive,  so  that  it 
will  be  the  first  letter  he  opens.  When  he 
does  open  it,  be  sure  he  finds  it  typewritten, 
even  if  you  have  to  spend  money  you  can 
ill  afford  to  spend. 

Fourth:     I  receive  many  letters  of  ap- 


A  Better  Job  193 

plication.  In  one  form  or  another,  they 
usually  say  something  like  this:  "  I  want 
a  better  job:  I  am  thinking  of  getting 
married  " ;  or,  "  I  have  a  mother  to  sup- 
port " ;  or,  "  I  have  been  three  years  in  this 
place  without  a  raise  and  see  no  future." 

All  of  which  interests  me  not  at  all. 

For  when  it  comes  to  spending  my  em- 
ployer's money  I  am  fundamentally  selfish. 

Much  as  I  should  like  to  give  jobs  to  all 
the  young  men  who  have  mothers  to  sup- 
port, or  who  see  no  future  where  they  are, 
I  can  not  do  it. 

The  only  letter  that  I  read  with  interest 
is  the  letter  of  the  young  man  who  has 
studied  my  business  and  who  points  out  to 
me  how  I  can  make  more  money  for  my 
employer  by  employing  him. 

One  of  the  biggest  business  men  I  know 
said  to  me:  "I  have  private  secretaries 
to  relieve  me  of  many  details;  but  one  de- 
tail I  never  delegate: 

"  I  make  it  a  rule  to  see  all  applicants 
for  positions" 

Why  did  he  have  that  rule? 

Because  his  business,  and  every  business 


194          More  Power  to  You 

in  America,  is  built  on  youth,  enthusiasm, 
and  ideas.  And  any  applicant  may  bring 
him  an  idea  that  would  be  worth  thousands 
of  dollars. 

Ideas  are  the  keys  that  unlock  big  men's 
doors. 

When  you  have  fitted  yourself  for  the 
better  job,  let  your  letter  of  application 
contain  an  Idea. 


XLV 

IP   YOU   WERE   TO   WRITE   YOUR  OWN   EPI- 
TAPH, WHAT  COULD  YOU  HONESTLY  SAY? 

IN    Ashland,    Ohio,    a    monument   was 
erected  a  little  while  ago  bearing  this 
inscription : 

In  Memory  of 
Ashland  County's  Pioneers 
Including  Johnny  Appleseed 

JOHN  CHAPMAN 

An  Ohio  Hero,  Patron  Saint 

Of  American  Orchards 

and 
Soldier  of  Peace. 

Who  was  John  Chapman? 

A  simple  man  like  you  and  me.  Born 
in  New  England,  he  roamed  to  Ohio.  He 
held  no  public  office;  he  accumulated  no 
fortune. 

But  everywhere  he  went  he  carried  a 
pocketful  of  apple-seeds.  He  dropped 
195 


196          More  Power  to  You 

them  into  the  rich  Ohio  soil,  along  the 
roadways.  At  his  home  he  reared  one 
apple  orchard  after  another,  giving  the 
young  trees  freely  to  settlers. 

And  to-day,  in  a  hundred  widely  scat- 
tered sections  of  Ohio,  the  roads  are 
shaded  with  fruit  trees  and  the  children 
eat  of  the  fruit  —  because  Johnny  Apple- 
seed  once  passed  that  way. 

Have  you  ever  heard  the  legend  of  how 
the  Mosque  of  St.  Sophia  got  its  name  ? 

The  Emperor  Justinian  built  it.  It 
was  to  be  his  monument,  to  bear  his  name 
forever. 

Every  bit  of  the  work  was  paid  for  by 
him;  every  operation  he  supervised.  He 
would  not  divide  the  credit  for  it  with  any 
other  living  soul,  though  there  were  many 
others  who  would  gladly  have  contributed. 
It  was  to  be  his,  and  his  alone. 

At  length,  in  the  incredibly  short  period 
of  five  years  and  ten  months,  it  was 
finished.  All  was  ready  for  the  unveiling 
of  the  tablet  that  was  to  bear  the  Em- 
peror's name  as  builder  to  the  end  of  time. 

The  crowds  gathered.     The  Emperor 


Your  Own  Epitaph  197 

stepped  forward  and  tore  away  the  veil  — 
then  drew  back  again,  aghast. 

For  on  the  tablet  where  he  had  ordered 
his  name  inscribed  was  found  the  name 
Sophia. 

Who  was  this  Sophia? 

The  Emperor  ordered  the  city  searched. 
Let  them  discover  the  culprit  whose  name 
had  displaced  his. 

The  second  day  they  brought  to  him  a 
poor,  cringing  washerwoman,  who  lived  in 
a  hovel  near  the  wharves.  Trembling  and 
tearful,  she  confessed. 

She  knew  the  decree  that  no  one  should 
contribute  anything  to  the  building  of  the 
temple  but  Justinian  alone.  Nevertheless 
she  had  wanted  to  have  a  little  share  in 
the  rearing  of  the  building  to  her  God. 

Having  nothing  to  give,  she  had  torn 
the  straw  from  her  mattress,  and  held  it 
out  to  the  weary  horses  as  they  passed, 
drawing  their  heavy  loads  of  stone  to  the 
hilltop. 

And  the  angels,  witnessing  her  gift,  had 
erased  the  name  of  Justinian  and  carved 
the  name  "  Sophia  "  instead. 


198          More  Power  to  You 

I  like  to  think  of  Johnny  Appleseed  and 
St.  Sophia.  I  like  to  believe  that  there 
never  lived  a  man  or  a  woman  so  humble 
but  that  he  or  she  could  contribute  some- 
thing permanent  to  the  world,  if  they 
would. 

What  could  be  written  over  you  if  you 
were  dead  to-morrow? 

Could  it  be  said: 

Here  lies  a  man  who  established  a  clean 
grocery  store  and  left  it  as  his  monument. 

Or: 

Here  lies  a  woman  who  gave  three  sons  to  the 
world,  all  God-fearing,  all  with  a  little  better 
start  than  she  had. 

Or  would  it  be  written : 

Here  lies  John  Jones,  who  held  a  succession 
of  jobs,  all  of  which  he  hated,  and  who  died 
from  heart  failure  while  hurrying  away  from  his 
work. 

Will  there  be  some  one  good  thing  left 
in  the  world  when  you  are  gone  —  a  cre- 
ation of  your  love? 

What  will  it  be? 


XLVI 

IP  YOU  WANT  TO  KNOW  HOW  MUCH  YOU 

OUGHT   TO   GET,    FIND   OUT    HOW 

MUCH   YOU    HAVE   TO   GIVE 

A  GREAT  word  has  been  added  to  the 
vocabulary  of  Business  in  recent 
years. 

It  is  being  overworked,  as  all  new 
words  are.  We  shall  doubtless  become 
very  tired  of  it,  as  we  have  become  tired 
of  "  psychology  "  and  "  efficiency  "  and 
"  merchandising  "  and  other  overworked 
words. 

But  the  idea  that  the  word  represents 
has  come  to  stay. 

The  word  itself  is  SERVICE. 

I  was  in  the  office  of  the  general  mana- 
ger of  a  great  corporation  recently.  The 
business  he  manages  has  departments  in 
almost  every  large  city.  It  is  a  business 
199 


aoo          More  Power  to  You 

that  has  unquestionably  been  of  enormous 
benefit  to  the  people  of  America,  and  has 
—  incidentally  —  made  millions  for  its 
founder. 

The  general  manager  read  me  a  letter 
from  the  "  Old  Man."  I  obtained  per- 
mission to  copy  four  paragraphs. 

Here  they  are.  What  do  you  think  of 
them  as  the  confession  of  faith  of  a  mil- 
lionaire? 

I  can  honestly  say  now  that  I  have  never 
worked  at  the  business  for  profit  as  the  main 
motive.  % 

My  profits  have  been  incidental,  though  ab- 
solutely necessary. 

I  have  always  conducted  my  business  solely 
for  the  purpose  of  what  I  considered  "  public 
service." 

Had  I  conducted  my  business  for  the  purpose 
of  making  profit,  I  might  have  made  as  much 
money  as  I  have  made,  although  I  doubt  it.  I 
am  sure  that  I  would  not  have  made  any  more. 
/  am  pretty  sure  that  I  would  not  have  made 
a  quarter  as  much. 

I  know  a  man  who  has  grown  rich  by 
building  and  operating  great  hotels. 


How  Much  You  Ought  to  Get     201 

I  slept  in  one  of  his  hotels  the  other 
night,  and  in  the  morning  I  dropped  into 
my  pocket  a  copy  of  his  book  of  instruc- 
tions to  his  employees.  Here  are  some 
quotations  from  that  book: 

A  hotel  has  just  one  thing  to  sell. 

That  one  thing  is  Service. 

The  Hotel  that  sells  Poor  Service  is  a  Poor 
Hotel. 

The  Hotel  that  sells  Good  Service  is  a  Good 
Hotel. 

It  is  the  object  of  this  Hotel  to  sell  its  guests 
the  very  best  service  in  the  world. 

The  Service  of  a  Hotel  is  not  a  thing  sup- 
plied by  any  single  individual.  It  is  not  Special 
Attention  to  any  one  guest. 

Hotel  Service  means  the  limit  of  Courteous, 
Efficient  Attention  from  Each  Particular  Em- 
ployee to  Each  Particular  Guest. 

This  is  the  kind  of  service  the  Guest  pays  for 
when  he  pays  his  bill  —  whether  it  is  for  $2  or 
$20  a  day.  It  is  the  kind  of  Service^he  is  en- 
titled to,  and  he  need  not  and  should  not  pay 
any  more. 

It  is  interesting  to  note  how,  in  the 
course  of  time,  the  practical  men  of  the 


2O2          More  Power  to  You 

world  finally  come  around  to  the  point  of 
view  of  the  world's  dreamers. 

Napoleon,  the  practical  man,  refused  to 
see  the  dreamer  Fulton,  with  his  absurd 
claim  that  he  could  make  a  boat  run  against 
tide  and  wind. 

But  to-day  all  practical  men  pay  tacit 
tribute  to  that  dreamer. 

For  two  thousand  years  practical  men 
have  looked  with  a  superior  sort  of  tol- 
erance on  the  teachings  of  a  certain  Car- 
penter of  Nazareth.  What  He  said  was 
very  good,  of  course,  but  utterly  imprac- 
tical. 

Yet  the  service  idea,  which  is  the  big 
new  idea  in  modern  business,  was  first  dis- 
covered and  announced  by  that  Carpenter : 

Whosoever  will  be  great  among  you,  let  him 
be  your  minister;  and  whosoever  will  be  chief 
among  you,  let  him  be  your  servant. 

It  is  the  one  solid,  practical  rule  for 
building  a  business  or  a  business  career. 

If  you  want  to  know  how  far  you  will 
go  in  business,  take  account  of  stock :  find 


How  Much  You  Ought  to  Get     203 

out  how  much  service  you  are  equipped  to 
perform. 

If  you  want  to  figure  what  you  are 
likely  to  get,  first  figure  what  you  have 
to  give. 


XLVII 

DOES  YOUR  RESPECT  FOR  FOLKS  GROW 
GREATER  OR  LESS  AS  YOU  GO  ALONG? 

1HAVE  made  no  change  in  the  follow- 
ing letter  except  to  erase  the  writer's 
name.     Read  it  all  the  way  through : 

It  is  not  an  easy  thing  to  put  into  writing 
an  experience  that  lies  as  close  to  one's  heart  as 
this  one  does  to  mine.  But  if  its  fortunate  out- 
come will  bring  cheer  to  some  other  similarly 
situated,  I  shall  be  glad  that  I  wrote  to  you 
about  it. 

Two  winters  ago  my  doctor  broke  the  news 
to  me  that  I  was  tubercular.  One  lung  and  both 
kidneys  were  affected.  I  had  to  give  up  my  po- 
sition at  once  and  put  myself  absolutely  under 
the  doctor's  care. 

I  was  engaged  to  be  married  at  the  time.  My 
doctor  told  me  that  marriage  was  out  of  the 
question.  I  decided  to  disregard  his  advice  on 
this  point,  feeling  that  I  could  never  give  up  the 
man  I  loved.  My  fiance  felt  the  same  way.  He 
204 


Your  Respect  for  Folks       205 

wanted  more  than  ever  to  be  my  helpmate,  and 
urged  me  not  to  obey  the  doctor  in  this  one 
matter. 

We  consoled  ourselves* —  a  bitter  consolation 
—  with  the  thought  that  perhaps  we  would  never 
have  any  children.  Even  if  we  had,  they  would 
not  necessarily  inherit  tuberculosis. 

Then,  as  I  lay  thinking,  there  came  to  me  this 
thought:  Suppose  that  I  should  have  a  baby 
after  all,  and  that  some  day  that  child  should  be 
told,  "  You  have  tuberculosis."  Not  for  any- 
thing in  the  world  would  I  want  a  child  of  mine 
to  go  through  that  first  terrible  agony  of  despair 
that  I  had  gone  through. 

The  next  day  I  told  my  fiance  my  decision. 
Oh,  it  was  hard,  Mr.  Barton.  We  separated. 
We  have  not  seen  each  other  since.  I  dare  not 
trust  the  strength  of  my  will  too  far. 

Of  course  I  thought  of  death,  the  speedier  the 
better.  I  contemplated  every  method  of  suicide, 
from  sitting  on  the  third  rail  to  breakfasting  on 
bichloride.  But  with  returning  spring  there 
came  the  renewed  desire  for  life. 

I  followed  the  doctor's  instructions  to  the  let- 
ter —  milk  and  eggs,  fresh  air  and  sunshine,  and 
absolute  rest.  By  the  end  of  the  year  my  lung 
was  entirely  cured.  The  kidneys  were  better, 
but  they  could  probably  never  be  entirely  well. 


206          More  Power  to  You 

Through  the  efforts  of  a  friend  I  obtained  a 
half-time  position  in  a  hospital,  which  leaves  my 
afternoons  free  for  the  rest  that  I  still  must  take. 
So  for  the  present  I  am  self-supporting,  obtain 
free  medical  treatment,  and  am  slowly  but  surely 
regaining  health. 

Best  of  all,  I  am  cheerful;  I  am  happy  in  my 
work,  which  is  largely  among  children.  And  I 
am  full  of  plans  for  the  future. 

Some  day,  if  God  is  willing,  I  ana  going  to 
have  a  bungalow  in  the  country-— a  bungalow 
that  has  a  flower  garden  in  front  of  it  and  a 
vegetable  garden  in  back.  And  then  I  am  going 
to  adopt  a  baby.  Not  a  hundred  per  cent,  bet- 
ter baby,  but  a  little  tubercular  girl,  Mr.  Barton, 
and  give  her  a  fair  chance  in  life,  even  as  has  been 
given  me. 

The  heartache  is  still  there,  of  course.  I  sup- 
pose it  always  will  be.  But  if  I  had  to  go 
through  it  all  again,  I  am  not  sure  that  I  would 
not  choose  the  same  way. 

What  feelings  are  stirred  up  in  you  as 
you  read  that  letter? 

Merely  a  momentary  irritation  that  a 
stranger  should  waste  your  time  in  telling 
you  her  troubles? 


Your  Respect  for  Folks       207 

Or  does  it  start  you  to  thinking  how 
much  of  patience  and  fidelity  and  quiet 
heroism  is  hidden  away  under  every  com- 
monplace life? 

There  is  a  verse  in  the  Bible  that  reads: 
'  What  is  man,  that  thou  art  mindful  of 
him?  and  the  son  of  man,  that  thou  visitest 
him?" 

Some  people  read  that  verse  to  mean: 
'  What  can  you  see  in  a  poor  creature  like 
man,  that  should  make  you  pay  any  atten- 
tion to  him?  " 

And  others  read:  "  What  a  wonderful 
thing  is  man,  that  even  God  Himself  likes 
to  visit  and  talk  to  him." 

Which  interpretation  is  yours? 

As  you  grow  older,  do  you  find  yourself 
becoming  less  patient  with  your  fellow 
men  and  women,  more  critical  of  their 
faults,  more  cynical  about  their  goodness, 
more  inclined  to  see  them  as  only  a  higher 
form  of  animal,  living  a  meaningless  life, 
dying  a  cowardly  death  ? 

Or  do  you  marvel  more  and  more  at  the 
patience  with  which  they  bear  their  bur- 
dens, the  unfaltering  faith  that  makes 


208          More  Power  to  You 

them  continue  to  hope  for  the  best,  even 
after  a  life-time  of  disappointments;  the 
unshaken  fidelity  that  fixes  their  eyes  on 
a  heaven  out  of  which  has  issued  so  little 
pleasure  mingled  with  so  much  of  suffer- 
ing? 

I  have  sometimes  thought  that  one 
measure  of  success  is  a  man's  increasing 
power  to  find  cause  for  reverence  in  the 
lives  of  his  fellow  men. 

Judged  by  that  standard,  have  you 
passed  the  peak  of  your  success,  or  are 
you  climbing  toward  it  year  by  year? 


XLVIII 

OF  COURSE  THERE  IS  A  SANTA  CLAUS 

Dear  Sir:  Do  you  really  think  there  is 
a  Santa  Claus?  My  mother  sa)'s  there  is. 
A  girl  in  the  seventh  grade  told  me  there 
is  n't  any  Santa  Claus.  Do  you  really  think 
there  is  any  Santa  Claus? 

MARION  THAYER  (age  seven). 

DO  I  think  there  is  a  Santa  Claus? 
Why,  Marion,  I  know  it. 
I  have  had  four  times  as  many  Christ- 
mases  as  you,  and  every  single  Christmas 
Santa  Claus  has  remembered  me.     Do  you 
think  I  would  be  ungrateful  to  him  now 
by  pretending  to  believe  any  stories  that 
any  girl  in  the  seventh  grade  might  tell? 
Of  course  I  have  never  seen  Santa  Claus. 
I  don't  want  to  see  him.     It  would  take 
all  the  fun  away  from  Christmas  if  I  ever 
did. 

209 


2io          More  Power  to  You 

But  just  because  I  never  saw  him  — 
what  does  that  signify? 

I  never  saw  electricity.  But  I  can  turn 
a  button  and  the  light  goes  on,  and  I 
know  electricity  is  there,  even  if  I  don't 
see  it. 

I  know  that  girl  in  the  seventh  grade,  or 
at  least  I  know  her  kind.  And  I  don't  like 
her,  Marion.  I  advise  you  to  keep  away 
from  her. 

She  will  meet  you  some  day,  when  you 
are  engaged  to  be  married.  And  you  will 
tell  her  that  your  boy  is  the  most  wonder- 
ful boy  in  the  world,  and  that  you  know 
you  are  going  to  be  happy  forever  and 
ever. 

And  she  will  pull  a  long  face  and  an- 
swer: "  Don't  be  too  sure.  You  '11  feel 
different  after  you  have  been  married  a 
few  years." 

But  you  won't  feel  different,  Marion. 
It 's  only  folks  that  don't  believe  in  Santa 
Claus  that  feel  different.  You  and  I  — 
we  '11  just  go  on  feeling  the  same  happy 
way  as  long  as  we  live. 

And  some  time  you  '11  meet  that  girl 


There  Is  a  Santa  Glaus       211 

who  has  lost  her  faith  in  Santa  Claus,  and 
you  '11  find  that  a  terrible  thing  has  hap- 
pened to  her.  She  has  lost  her  faith  in 
women  and  in  men. 

It  seems  impossible,  doesn't  it? 

You  and  I  know  that  women  are  pure 
and  clean  and  sweet,  just  like  your  mother 
—  all  except  witches,  of  course,  and  bad 
fairies. 

And  men  are  strong  and  handsome  and 
noble,  like  your  father  —  all  except  pirates 
and  robbers  that  live  on  desert  islands. 

We  love  women  and  men,  you  and  I, 
because  we  know  how  good  they  are,  and 
how  kind,  in  spite  of  the  troubles  they 
have. 

But  some  of  the  girls  who  don't  believe 
in  Santa  Claus  grow  up  and  don't  believe 
in  men  and  women,  either. 

And  sometimes  —  sometimes  those  girls 
grow  up  and  don't  even  believe  in  angels 
and  in  God. 

I  don't  see  how  they  dare  to  go  to  bed 
in  the  dark. 

Your  mother  is  right,  Marion,  and 
don't  you  ever  doubt  it.  And  I  'm  right. 


212          More  Power  to  You 

And  that  girl  in  the  seventh  grade  is 
wrong. 

The  best  things  in  your  whole  life  — 
love,  and  faith,  and  friendship,  and  trust, 
and  God  —  are  things  you  never  see. 

But  they  're  the  only  things  worth  be- 
lieving in.  Life  does  n't  mean  very  much 
when  they  begin  to  disappear. 

You  and  I  won't  let  them  begin  to  dis- 
appear. Not  one  of  them.  Not  even 
good  old  Santa  Claus. 

I  hang  up  my  stocking  every  year, 
Marion.  All  sensible  people  do.  It 's 
only  the  foolish  ones,  who  say  "  seeing  's 
believing,"  that  don't. 

And  they  're  awfully  foolish,  Marion. 
I  would  n't  give  anything  for  the  things  I 
can  see  in  life  compared  with  the  things 
that  I  never  can  see. 


XLIX 


"  I  DREAD  THE  END  OF  THE  YEAR  " 


1  T  DREAD  to  come  to  the  end  of  the 
1  year,"  said  a  friend  to  me  recently; 
"  it  makes  me  realize  I  am  growing  old." 

That  suggests  a  question:  When  is  a 
man  old? 

In  Shakespeare's  time  a  man  was  old  at 
forty,  and  often,  because  of  the  gay  life, 
invalided  long  before  that. 

Sir  Walter  Scott  at  fifty-five  bemoaned 
the  fact  that  he  was  an  old  man. 

Montaigne  retired  to  his  castle  at 
thirty-eight  to  spend  his  declining  years  in 
peace  and  study. 

Dr.  Samuel  Johnson  once  remarked 
that  at  thirty-five  a  man  had  reached  his 
peak,  and  after  that  his  course  must  be 
downward. 

Physiologists  tell  us  that  in  all  mam- 
mals except  man  the  period  of  life  is  five 
213 


214          More  Power  to  You 

times  the  period  of  growth.  A  dog  gets 
its  full  growth  in  two  years,  and  lives  ten; 
a  horse  in  five  years,  and  lives  twenty- 
five.  On  this  basis  a  man  should  live 
from  one  hundred  to  one  hundred  and 
fifty  years. 

Why  were  these  three  men  —  Scott, 
Montaigne,  and  Johnson  —  old  while  still 
comparatively  young? 

The  answer  is,  because  they  felt  old 
and  acted  old. 

William  James,  the  great  psychologist, 
said  that  most  men  are  "  old  fogies  at 
twenty-five." 

He  was  right.  Most  men  at  twenty- 
five  are  satisfied  with  their  jobs.  They 
have  accumulated  the  little  stock  of  preju- 
dices that  they  call  their  "  principles/'  and 
closed  their  minds  to  all  new  ideas:  they 
have  ceased  to  grow. 

The  minute  a  man  ceases  to  grow, —  no 
matter  what  his  years, —  that  minute  he 
begins  to  be  old. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  really  great  man 
never  grows  old. 

Bismarck,  who  died  at  eighty-three,  did 


"  /  Dread  the  End  of  the  Year  "     215 

his  greatest  work  after  he  was  seventy. 

Titian,  the  celebrated  painter,  lived  to 
be  ninety-nine,  painting  right  up  to  the 
end. 

Goethe  passed  out  at  eighty-three,  and 
finished  his  "  Faust "  only  a  few  years 
earlier;  Gladstone  took  up  a  new  language 
when  he  was  seventy;  Commodore  Van- 
derbilt  increased  the  mileage  of  his  lines 
from  1 20  to  more  than  10,000  between 
his  seventieth  birthday  and  his  death  at 
eighty-three. 

Laplace,  the  astronomer,  was  still  at 
work  when  death  caught  up  with  him  at 
seventy-eight.  He  died  crying,  "  What 
we  know  is  nothing:  what  we  do  not  know 
is  immense. " 

And  there  you  have  the  real  answer  to 
the  question,  When  is  a  man  old? 

Laplace  at  seventy-eight  died  young. 
He  was  still  unsatisfied,  still  growing,  still 
sure  that  he  had  a  lot  to  learn. 

As  long  as  a  man  can  keep  himself  in 
that  attitude  of  mind,  as  long  as  he  can 
look  back  on  every  year  and  say,  "  I 
grew/'  he  is  still  young. 


216          More  Power  to  You 

The  minute  he  ceases  to  grow,  the  day 
he  says  to  himself,  "  I  know  all  that  I  need 
to  know  " —  that  day  youth  stops.  He 
may  be  twenty-five  or  seventy-five,  it  makes 
no  difference.  On  that  day  he  begins  to 
be  old. 


"  IF   A   MAN   DIE,    SHALL    HE 
LIVE   AGAIN?  " 

IT  is  the  age-old  question,  asked  at  the 
side  of  every  bier  —  asked  by  all  the 
Christian  world  at  Easter-time. 

And  what  can  one  say  in  answer  to  it? 

Every  one  of  us  is  taught  in  childhood 
to  believe  in  God  and  an  after  life. 

I  remember,  when  I  was  beginning  to 
read  and  think  a  little,  it  occurred  to  me 
that,  though  I  had  been  told  there  is  a 
future  life,  nobody  had  ever  given  me  any 
proof. 

So  industriously  I  set  to  work  in  the 
public  library  to  read  the  works  of  the 
greatest  men  who  ever  lived  and  find 
proofs  for  myself. 

And  I  remember  how,  slowly  at  first, 
then  faster  and  faster,  I  turned  through 
one  wise  man's  book  after  another. 
217 


21 8          More  Power  to  You 

"  Surely  this  one  will  know/'  I  said  to  my- 
self; "  or  this  one;  or  this." 

And  suddenly  the  bitter  truth  flashed 
over  me.  They  did  not  know,  any  more 
than  I  did.  All  their  proofs  were  not 
proofs  at  all.  In  all  history  there  had 
never  lived  a  man  wise  enough  to  prove 
immortality.  Almost  everybody  believed: 
nobody  really  knew. 

It  was  a  discovery  that  left  me  helpless 
at  first:  then  slowly  out  of  my  helplessness 
I  began  to  evolve  a  little  system  of  my 
own. 

In  the  first  place,  it  seems  to  me  easier 
to  believe  than  to  disbelieve. 

"  The  world  just  happened,"  say  some 
men.  "  It  created  itself  through  the 
operation  of  natural  laws." 

And  that  sounds  very  scientific  and  sat- 
isfactory. 

But  who  or  what  established  the  natural 
laws  and  set  them  to  operating? 

When  you  can  dump  a  load  of  bricks 
on  a  corner  lot,  and  let  me  watch  them  ar- 
range themselves  into  a  house  —  when 
you  can  empty  a  handful  of  springs  and 


"If  a  Man  Die"  219 

wheels  and  screws  on  my  desk,  and  let  me 
see  them  gather  themselves  together  into 
a  watch  —  it  will  be  easier  for  me  to  be- 
lieve that  all  these  thousands  of  worlds 
could  have  been  created,  balanced,  and  set 
to  moving  in  their  separate  orbits,  all  with- 
out any  directing  intelligence  at  all. 

Moreover,  if  there  is  no  intelligence  in 
the  universe,  then  the  universe  has  created 
something  greater  than  itself  —  for  it  has 
created  you  and  me. 

Is  it  easy  to  believe  that  a  universe  with- 
out personality  could  have  created  us  who 
have  personality? 

Is  n't  it  easier  to  believe  that  our  per- 
sonality is  a  little  part  of  the  great  per- 
vading Personality  that  has  created  and 
now  permeates  the  universe? 

And  if  there  be  a  Personality  in  the  uni- 
verse —  a  God  —  what  kind  of  a  God  is 
He? 

He  must  be  at  least  as  good  as  you  or 
I.  He  could  not  have  made  us  better 
than  Himself.  The  worse  can  not  create 
the  better. 

And  if  He  is  a  good  God,  is  it  reason- 


220          More  Power  to  You 

able  to  suppose  that  He  would  have 
planted  in  human  hearts  this  unquenchable 
yearning  for  immortality,  and  left  that 
yearning  unsatisfied? 

You  and  I  would  not  have  done  so. 

Go  where  you  will,  from  the  most  sav- 
age race  to  the  most  cultured,  you  find  that 
same  instinctive  assurance  that  death  is  not 
the  end.  Would  a  good  God  plant  that 
assurance  in  his  creatures  merely  to  mock 
them? 

Without  immortality  the  world  is  an 
answerless  riddle.  We  are  born;  we 
struggle  up  through  slow  years  of  develop- 
ment; and  just  as  we  have  reached  our 
highest  point  of  usefulness  —  we  are  cut 
off. 

What  inefficiency !     What  waste ! 

It  is  hard  for  me  to  believe  in  a  universe 
that  made  itself,  and  that  ruthlessly  casts 
away  its  most  precious  possession  —  hu- 
man personality. 

It  is  easier  to  believe  that  back  of  the 
universe  is  a  guiding  Intelligence,  of  whose 
personality  my  own  is  a  tiny  spark  that 
shall  not  go  out  while  He  lives. 


"If  a  Man  Die"  221 

If  I  can  not  prove  that  this  is  so,  neither 
can  any  one  prove  to  me  that  it  is  not  so. 

And,  until  some  one  can  disprove  it,  I 
find  it  easier,  more  helpful,  more  efficient, 
to  believe. 


THE   END 


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